I’ve been busy washing Matt’s sandy stuff from Junior Guard at the beach, followed by his sweaty stuff from baseball.
Day after day.
I was going to whine here a bit, but then I realized how incredibly fortunate I am to have this wonderful kid who is healthy and able to do these activities. I am blessed.
Pass the OxiClean!
I have to admit, one of my favorite movies of all time is “Bull Durham.” My husband loves it, too. And we’re all big baseball fans in our family. We even go to minor-league and independent-league games now and then.
I found myself thinking the other day, “Boy, I can’t wait ’till Randy and I can watch “Bull Durham” with Matthew.” Well, Matt is 13, and baseball fun aside, I’m just not ready for him to watch Susan Sarandon‘s character, Annie Savoy, tie Tim Robbins‘ character, Ebby Calvin ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh (gotta love that name), to the bedposts.
Yes, we feel a bit alone in the wilderness on this one, because many of Matt’s 8th-grade friends are allowed to watch R-rated movies. Some of them have been watching them for years. But as I tell Matt, some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to “your dad and I have to do what’s right for our family.”
What are some of your favorite movies that you can’t wait to share with your kid when he’s a little older?
Found out that my 7th-grader, who got whacked in the nose with a baseball at practice, has a hairline fracture. Fun!
At least it isn't dislocated. The thought of the "fix" for that gave both of us the shudders. (Do they just numb it up, grab it and straighten that baby out? I have no idea. Not sure I want to know…)
So we're each handling it in our own way. I'm trying not to ask him, every 15 minutes, "How does your nose feel?" And Matt? He seems secretly just a bit pleased to have a sports-related battle scar to talk about with his buddies.
Boys. You gotta love 'em.
It wasn’t all that long ago that my son, Matt, was thrilled to be wearing his first baseball glove (carefully broken in by Dad in a weeks-long ritual involving special oil, rubber bands and voo-doo, I think). Matt was beyond excited to help carry the team banner in his first Little League parade, and he couldn’t wait to get up to bat in his first t-ball game.
That little guy with the baggy baseball pants is now 12 years old, 5’7″, a pretty good pitcher and running full-tilt toward his next baseball league. Time, it seems, is rushing by faster than a line drive to left field.
So it was especially poignant to open my e-mail recently and to read a note from the president of our local Little League:
“On a personal note, our fourth child will leave Little League for high school baseball next fall. For the first time in 15 years, we will not have a child playing Little League,” he wrote. “The time slipped by very quickly and our children have few memories of championships or All Star teams. Instead, they just have a love of the game, an appreciation for sportsmanship and competition, and fond memories of time spent with Dad.”
He ended his letter to the parents with some advice: “Please relax and enjoy this time in your child’s life. It will pass quickly…”
That’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind every season as Team Sena scurries around the house, grabbing cleats, equipment and water bottles, and then heading off to yet another game, yelling to each other “Did someone feed the dog?” “Do you have your baseball cap?” “Are the stadium seats in the trunk?” as we rush out the door.
Between practice and games (on top of homework and all the regular stuff that keeps a mom churning until 11:00 most nights), my time certainly isn’t my own during baseball season. But I’m acutely aware that that’s not a permanent state of affairs. So I’m trying to appreciate each crack of the bat just a bit more than I probably did when the end wasn’t so clearly in sight (or, let’s face it, when my turn for snack-stand duty rolled around).
Because in the not-too-distant future, I’ll have to be satisfied with flipping through scrapbooks and watching home videos showing a bunch of wound-up, grass-stained, sunflower-seed-filled boys in a dugout, yelling “LET’S GO SEN-A!”
I hope Matt has wonderful memories of these years. I know his dad and I will. The knowledge that nothing lasts forever — in Little League or in life — sometimes makes my heart ache as a parent. But it also makes every snack-stand hot dog, every scramble to first base, every glance up at the stands to grin at Mom and Dad after a good play, just that much more delicious.
Wow. Twelve-year-old Dalton Carriker just hit a home run
in the bottom of the eighth inning to give Warner Robins,
Georgia a 3-2 win over Tokyo in the championship game of the
Little League World Series.
In a game like this, it’s easy to say there are no losers. It’s tough to get to this level, and all the players are top-notch. Yet one team has to come out on top. As a mom, it was hard to see the tears streaming down the faces of the boys from the Tokyo team. They’re just a year older than my own son, and they had just played their hearts out.
Then something wonderful happened.
Well, I stuck my foot in it this time. As if parenting doesn’t automatically present enough challenges on its own, I managed to create one this week.
On Sunday, we took Matthew and a friend to see an independent-league baseball game. Big fun. A beautiful afternoon. Hot dogs. Lots of silly games, like musical chairs, on the field between innings. Good family stuff.
We’ve been going to these baseball games for a couple of years now, and I started to wonder, "How do they pick the kids to participate in the silly games?" So I asked a staff person about it and before I knew it, Matt and his friend were signed up to play "Dizzy Bat" on the field between the 8th and 9th innings.
