Tag Archives: baseball

April Fools (Me Every Time)

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I got a pedicure on Saturday. I sorted out the kids’ summer clothes and found out what still fits and what can go to some lucky slightly smaller people. I swapped the winter duvets on all our beds for the summer ones.

So of course, temperatures are going to drop into the 20s tonight. (That’s below freezing.) I would bring back the duvets, but B enthusiastically put them into vacuum bags and sucked all the air out and was delighted with himself, so I think it’ll be extra blankets all round.

You would think I would know by now, not to go casting clouts until April, at least, is out. But no, I am a rash and impetuous creature, governed by whims and flights of fancy and susceptible to the warm spring breezes. Aren’t we all, after that long, long winter? I should just be happy that all we got today was a lot of rain, not like the s-n-o-w they had further north.

Baseball-ready, 2014

Baseball-ready, 2014

Baseball season has started again, so Dash is happy. He ran the nursery school’s fundraiser 1k fun run on Saturday and won it for the second year in a row. Next year he’s going to have to just run the 5k and leave the 1 for the younger children or it’ll start to look like he’s hogging it.

Rounding the last bend, well ahead of the competition

Rounding the last bend, well ahead of the competition

It’s spring break and so far we’ve had a playdate, done the grocery shopping, and gone to the thrift store, where they had the amazing find of a green lightsaber. “I’ve missed having a green lightsaber,” said Dash, for whom two blue ones and a red double-blade are not enough, apparently.

His birthday is coming up – AGAIN – and he wants a Star Wars party – AGAIN – for he is a creature of habit. And I’m trying to think how we can disguise a Star Wars party as something subtly different so his friends don’t all die of boredom and think they’re stuck in a time warp. So I’ll be in the corner with my notebook chewing the end of my pen and writing lists, which is how I think best, for a while.

As always, you can find me waxing hilarious (be charitable) and/or sensible over on Parent.ie if you’re missing the more regular updates here.

The sporty one

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The fact that it’s mid-March should mean that winter is well behind us, but the weather forecast tells a different story: we have 5 to 9 inches of snow forecast for Monday. I utterly refuse to believe it.

Dash is doing beginner’s ice hockey, did I tell you? It’s so beginner that they haven’t even touched a stick or a puck yet, and they’ve had four of their six classes, but it’s all about learning technique, apparently. Which mostly means how to skate better, so I’m all for that. He’s come along a lot considering in December he was like an octopus on ice, all flailing arms and falling down. Last Sunday I took both kids to the open skate (while B recovered from his 50km race; need I elaborate?) and Dash was showing Mabel and me how to skate backwards and practicing his jump-stops and not falling down at all. I’m impressed. It was worth the ridiculous amount of hockey gear I had to shell out for, because it was too late in the season to find anything second-hand.

Meanwhile, Mabel has decided she doesn’t want to take dance this term, so she has zero extra-curriculars, while he has hockey now and baseball already signed-up for starting in April. My surprisingly sporty child, that one. I fear he’s getting this privileged treatment as the firstborn, because once he’s doing things I’m reluctant to fill up all our other evenings with other things for Mabel – like T-ball, for instance. But it’s also because I’m pretty much 100% sure she has no interest in doing T-ball. Although she’ll freely admit that she wants a trophy, just doesn’t want to play the sport.

Mabel dishing up muffin batter

The non-sporty one.

 

Little Americans

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I didn’t get selected for the Listen To Your Mother cast. That’s fine, really. It gets us out of a babysitting hole because one of the unmissable rehearsal days was when B would be on a very rare work trip. It would have been fun; I might audition again next year.

Anyway, it means I have a ready-made blog post for today. This is the piece I wrote for it.

———-

I never meant to have American children.

Years ago – far too many years ago to count in public – I was in Boston with my boyfriend. (He was from Ireland too.) One day on a dusty baseball diamond near where we were staying, we saw some kids playing T-ball. I heard their little shouts and watched their little legs run and realised that their American accents were already in place. You know how when you’re in a foreign country it’s amazing that even the three-year-olds can speak the language? It was like that. “They’re tiny Americans,” I thought. “They’re going to grow up to be American all the way down. How bizarre.”

If you’d told me then that I’d have American children, I’d have been positively insulted. That was one thing – the one thing – that I would definitely not do. My children would be Irish, like me and my mother before me. They would grow up with the wind and the rain, rosy-cheeked and soft-skinned, they would paddle in the chilly Irish Sea and complain about their Irish-language homework and criticize Bono (because that is the birthright of natives) and sound like suburban Dubliners, just like their parents.

What’s that saying about fate laughing at your plans?

It began with thinking we could have a baby in America so long as we moved home to Ireland before he knew what was what. Things progressed, so that I felt if we moved before he started school, that would be fine. Oh look, now I have a second-grader and a rising kindergartener and hey guess what, they’re American.

Becoming a mother so far from my mother – and everyone else – gave me a certain freedom. If I’d been surrounded by all those people whose opinions count, whose merest incline of the head I might interpret as a judgement of my parenting choices – well, I might have made different choices. As it was, I was free to read the books I wanted to, to find my tribe on the Internet, to follow my instincts and trust myself with my babies. If people looked askance at me in America for whatever I might have been doing – breastfeeding in the supermarket, for instance – well, I’m a foreigner. A European. And we all know what those Europeans are like.

Similarly, if in Ireland my mother wondered when I was going to stop breastfeeding in the supermarket, for instance (or wherever), she could put it down to the hippie dippie influence of America, where they have no inhibitions at all.

Probably, nobody was judging me, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was free to play the crazy foreigner card on both sides of the Atlantic.

So my kids have American accents. Of course they do: they were born here. They have American passports and American birth certificates and American social security numbers. My kids learned to swim in a lovely warm outdoor pool in a swelteringly humid DC summer. My son rattles off the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with his classmates. Despite their parents’ best efforts, they say mailman and sidewalk and zee and twenny and sometimes they even talk about to-may-toes.

And that’s okay. Maybe time has softened me. Maybe I’m coming to terms with being almost-American myself. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because when they meet their Irish cousins – once the first amazed comments from their aunts and uncles about how American they sound have been registered, for the record – they all start talking about Disney movies and My Little Ponies and superheroes and the Irish cousins are saying “awesome” and quoting Star Wars just as much everyone else.

Life does funny things. You can tell it where you want to go, but it’s not a taxi driver. Sometimes it just picks you up and swirls you around and points you back the way you came, or to exactly the wrong spot; and you can rail against it, and you can decide to get off the bus and walk, or you can recalibrate your expectations and work with what you’ve got. Mostly, you have to do a bit of everything and muddle about and see what happens.

If I had been so dead-set against having American children, maybe I shouldn’t have taken up with a boy whose ambition was to go study in the States after he finished his undergrad degree. But I have no regrets.

Last summer, my seven-year-old signed up for baseball. He ran his little American heart out on our local dusty diamond, and I sat on the bleachers and cheered for him.

Machine-pitch baseball

Minor obsessions and second-child woes

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You may have noticed that I ran out of new obsessions after a mere four-day week. Sorry, but I can only muster so many obsessions at once. I considered including baseball , but it’s more a case of “vaguely more interested than I was before,” which doesn’t really count as an obsession. However, I do want to note that Dash’s team finished their season in second place (out of three, but it was still an upset) and he clearly improved over the course of the eight weeks. We also went to a special Star-Wars-themed game of Real Baseball (i.e. Minor League pros) on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun, if somewhat marred by Mabel being absolutely terrified of the excellent fireworks display at the end.

But there was something very nice, I found, about the sense of community with the other parents, sitting in the evening warmth on the little bleachers beside the local little-league diamond, listening for the sweet metallic clunk as bat connected with ball, clapping and shouting for all the kids, yelling “Heads up!” when a ball went the wrong way, finding myself saying “He had a good inning” and realizing that I’d just used an idiom perfectly literally.

Little league machine pitch
My view from the free seats

Of course, that only happened for one minute out of every five, because if I was there, Mabel was with me and I was mostly trying to keep her out of trouble as the minutes ticked towards and far past time for her to be safely tidied away from human interaction.

After the trophy presentation on Sunday – in which every child who participated got a trophy, of course – Mabel was enumerating the injustices of life once more. “I don’t want to play soccer or baseball,” she told me, “but it’s not fair that Dash has four trophies and I have none.”

She’s right, it’s not. Dash did three seasons of soccer and got a trophy at the end of each one, and now he has another. The unfairness comes from the fact that while I’ve offered Mabel the opportunity to play soccer for the past couple of years, I haven’t really pushed it when she declined, because all those Saturday mornings are a pain in the ass, especially when the older child is/might be doing some other activity. So she gets the bad breaks of the second, and maybe of the girl, and that’s not fair at all.

But if she wants to play T-ball next year, and Dash goes back to baseball, we might have logistical difficulties with conflicting schedules. Or, if they don’t conflict, having to be somewhere four nights a week, which was hard enough for two. B and I both have our own evening commitments every now and then as well. (And I don’t just mean a hot date with the sofa, a bottle of wine, and a Netflix, though lord knows that sounds lovely and is hard enough to come by.)

For the moment, I’m just tidying Dash’s trophy collection onto a high shelf inside his closet and hoping she’ll forget about it for a while.

Getting to first base

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At some point a long time ago, in my teenagehood, I suppose, I met the terms “first base,” “second base,” and so on – in a romantic sense, let’s say. In a book or a film or something. I had a vague idea of what they referred to, but I wasn’t so hot on the specifics. A lot of questions remained unanswered for many years: Which way did the sequence go – was “first” the very beginning or the final target? (First is the winning place, after all.) But then if first was the start, how many bases were there – was this an open-ended thing? Could you define your own bases, perhaps, to infinitely frustrate the boys?

The problem was that while I read American books and watched American films, I had no knowledge of American sports. Sure, I’ve seen Bull Durham and Field of Dreams , I can say something came out of left field or talk about home runs, but I’d never actually been to a baseball game. And those phrases, it turns out, about the bases – they’re talking about baseball. Well, except when they’re not, obviously.

And then. Dash took up baseball this season. He’s playing “machine pitch,” which is what they do for the seven- and eight-year-olds. It’s slightly harder than T-ball (where the ball is propped up on a stand to be struck) but easier than expecting the kids to pitch a hittable ball as well as hit it – a machine sends the balls at them in what’s supposed to be a steady stream of nicely centered, not-too-fast pitches.

Looking good

But after a couple of practices, B. pointed out to me that the poor boy has no notion what he’s meant to be doing, beyond the hitting and the catching (which are not as easy as they look). He’s never even watched a game on the TV, never mind in real life. So we decided we should take in a game.

I’ve never been one for sports, really, and I’m lucky enough to be married to a man who is also not very interested in watching the game, whatever game it might be. I’m pretty sure that the only time I’ve ever been to a professional sporting event before, it was (ironically enough) an exhibition game of American football in Dublin that we got free tickets to, and it was incredibly boring and totally incomprehensible.

Maybe I had lumped baseball with football and decided that it too would be incredibly boring. Maybe I felt that not going to a game was the last bastion of not being American that I wished to hold out on. Maybe I just had no reason and no interest. But however it came about, after ten years in the country, yesterday I finally went to a real actual proper ballgame.

Looks authentic, no?

Not the big leagues, of course. We started small, with a minor league game close to home – but still professional baseball. The weather was just right – warm enough but not too hot or sunny. The game was well-attended but not too crowded. Dash wore his shorts in case they needed an extra player at the last minute.

Dash demonstrates his swing
The genius of the people who plan these things, though, is that they understand that baseball is sometimes not the most thrilling of spectator sports. So it’s not like you’re watching Federer serve at Wimbledon, being shushed by the umpire if you sneeze. The place had lots of families, babies, dogs (is that a thing, or was it a special bring-your-pooch-to-the-game day yesterday?), and the players just did their thing regardless of whether my children were running up and down or clambering over the seats or wailing because their giant ice-cream cone was dripping all over their hands. 
“Need some help with that?”
And when they got too bored to keep watching, and we’d done the pizza and the ice-cream and refused the cotton candy, there was a carousel and a bouncy castle and pitching and hitting games right there to help parents donate even more dollars to the nice baseball people, and then hot dogs and popcorn. Not to mention the between-innings competitions and adorably bad pre-game show and requisite toe-curling rendition of the national anthem. And I think I’d even have quite enjoyed watching the baseball players if I’d had more than five minutes to pay attention to what they were doing.
We stayed for about an hour and a half before calling it quits just as a sprinkle of rain was beginning. I think we’ll probably do it again, it was that good.
What’s more, I would probably be able to reliably go back in time and let my teenage self know what was what with the bases. Just in case she ever needed to know.