Are you ready for some football????

Sadly, my love affair with football did not start as early as the adorable toddler above (that's Jailyn, my step-daughter.....in the Romo jersey her daddy bought her.......this was last season prior to all hope being extinguished, but I digress).

My parents apparently were not aware of the joys of the Sunday tradition of drinking beer and yelling at the television. Both born in the south, but somehow no one indoctrinated them. So, I discovered football in high school. My two best friends (Christen and Candice) and I would sneak into the field house (well, not really sneak so much as just walk into the foul-smelling, run down, concrete building) to decorate the players' lockers prior to the first game of the season.

We'd spend Wednesday afternoon cheer practices (or was it Thursdays? I don't really remember) decorating the run-through. Friday nights rolled around and we'd pile onto a bus and drive to whatever town had been randomly selected and cheer our hearts out while watching our beloved McClellan Lions get the daylights beat out of them. Our football teams always sucked (I can use one hand to count the number of games we won during my entire high school tenure), but who cares? It was football! The majority of my life from preseason to play-offs revolved around cheerleading and football.

Now that I am a little older (and my cheerleading uniform looks like it's better suited to fit Jailyn than me), I have discovered the only way I know to keep that standing-on-the-sidelines-yelling-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-for-the-running-back-to-get-in-the-end-zone feeling alive every fall.........NFL football. The first pre-season Cowboys game is in two days, and I still feel the same butterflies I did when I stood on the red clay track in my red and white mini-skirt and implored the crowed to get loud for those Lions.

The fact that my little boy is arriving just in time for me to put a jersey on him and teach him all about the joy of victory and the agony of defeat (oh and allow me to participate in the beer drinking part of the Sunday tradition) just confirms for me that being a parent is going to be serious fun.