My First Netball Game

My zeal to embrace all things Australian may have gotten the best of me today. My dear friend and neighbor Sally and the awesome ladies we play tennis with convinced me to join a netball team. A perfect way to soak up Aussie culture, right? That they somehow spotted my competitive streak still astounds me. Ahem. At any rate, I bought my ridiculously short uniform, attended 2 practices and soaked up all the instructional videos YouTube had to offer. Here is a link to one of the videos if you want to get a feel for the game. Sophia, who has been playing netball at school, also offered up a few tips. She even served as the official photographer..

Photo credit:  Sophia Lark

Today was the first game of the season. It was so much fun. At first we were all a bit freaked out when our opponent turned out to be a group of 16-year-olds (year 11 aka juniors to us americans) complete with a coach and official scorekeeper.  The first quarter was a bit bleak. The umpire was blowing her whistle every few seconds and we looked like deer caught in the headlights as we tried to figure out what we were doing wrong.   But then we got it together and ended up coming from behind to win.   Go, Mosman moms!  They might have had youth, agility and skill on their side but we had an exuberant and under-supervised crowd of kids - ranging in age from 1 to 12 - on ours. 
The bad part didn't come until later. In the fourth quarter I twisted my ankle but didn't think much about it at the time. I was fine for the first few hours.  But now it is extremely swollen and painful and I can't put any weight on it.  I'm following the RICE (rest, ice, compress and elevate) treatment, have dug into my stash of imported Advil and am hoping it will improve dramatically by tomorrow. Thank god i still have crutches from the stair incident. And before you ask, it was the other foot.
At least we have a few weeks off until our next game. The first school term comes to a close this Thursday and not much gets scheduled during school holidays. The kids and i are going to New Zealand to visit nanna and granddad fish for a few days and andy's cousin Lorraine and her family are coming to visit us so it should be action-packed. Yet another reason why this ankle problem had better be temporary.  More soon as I'm way behind on my updates...which will feature Picasso, a possible new career in law and the car I'm planning to steal from Andy. . .stay tuned!  Miss you..  xoxoxo.