Cast off today...

No, I don't mean in the maritime sense. Noah got the cast off his left arm this morning. The report from Kathy was that all went well and Noah is glad to be able to scratch his arm and looks forward to taking showers again.

Ironically, his performance in sports over the last week has been much higher than usual, even with his cast on. As I had posted earlier, at basketball last Saturday he had an exceptional day. Noah hasn't played much basketball so I would have expected him to be in the lower half of the kids as far as performance goes, and with his cast I was pretty sure he would be lucky to touch the rim with a shot. But he appeared to be one of the highest scorers, if not THE highest scorer on the court. Plus, he did a fair amount of passing the basketball as well, so it wasn't that he was a ball hog - he just made about 75% of his shots.

Yesterday we let him play soccer for the first time since he got the cast on. He wasn't allowed to play in goal, but everything else was fair game. Noah has taken to soccer, I suppose since it is very popular here, we get a lot if it on TV and his non-American friends don't know about baseball or American football. Noah started way behind his friends in ability since they had been playing soccer exclusively their whole lives. They even made fun of him earlier on for not making some plays that they felt were easy. Well, it turns out that yesterday he scored six goals- the most that he has ever scored - by far - and he lead the kids in scoring, just like in basketball on Saturday. From Noah's description, a couple of the goals seemed to have been accidental, having gone in on what he intended to be passes. So maybe it was just a lucky day for him. By the end of the game, though, his friends had decided the source of Noah's new sporting prowess - it was the "lucky cast".

With the cast now history we will see if his recent sporting success was 1) luck, 2) related to normal maturing and increased coordination or 3) the "lucky cast".