Tag Archives: sports

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.

 

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.