Every year since we've been married (and probably since conception before that), Willem has joined a football pool through espn.com. It's not one where you pick the individual players along the way like you're at a dog race - "Bet on the one that does his business right before the race" - but where you pick which of two teams will win a given game, several times over every week, sixteen weeks a year, stretching on and on and on into the future as far as the brain can conceive.

Can you sense my enthusiasm? But it makes Willem happy and doesn't negatively impact my life, so I don't need to be enthusiastic. So there.

Anyway. Since Emily's birth, we have also set up a place for the kids to enter their picks - and some weeks they do quite well, to the chagrin of the frat boys, er, I mean, adult fraternity members, who are also in the pool. They've never come remotely close to winning the whole season, but they're being raised on it. They should be forces to be reckoned with as adults.

Which, incidentally, was one of the things I assigned as Willem's fatherly duty from the moment I knew I was pregnant with Emily - he needs to teach all of our children, male or female, the rules of football. So that they can choose whether to be unenthusiastic as an adult, rather than going through the process of having several indulgent and condescending people explaining minute deviations of rules during the game so that THEN they can be unenthusiastic. Or, one never knows... maybe they'll all get really into it and I'll have Sundays to myself. There are advantages...

So, this morning, they did their first list of picks. There was one game Thursday night, apparently, and I'm to report that Willem and Jacob picked it correctly and Emily did not. But today they had to enter in their list for the other 400 games being played tomorrow - "And Monday!" Okay, and Monday.

And my personal favorite of Jacob's picks, and possbily my all-time favorite football pick, is that he thinks the Baltimore Raisins will win. Go, boys!