7-14-11 - why we're really home for a 7-week vacation

I have heard for nearly 11 months how by moving to Bogota, we ripped Mac away from his BFF and from the best place on Earth (that would be Summerville, South Carolina for those of you not from there). And I promised for nearly all of those 11 months that Mac would get to spend all summer back at home. (I really sort of hoped being back here would make him realize that it's not entirely the land of milk and honey, but I don't think I'm succeeding yet - he's having a great time.)

So to fulfill that promise, Mac and I have come back for a total of 7 weeks which we have never ever done before. We're not in South Carolina for the whole time, but we're certainly taking full advantage of our time here to get these boys together. Mac is loving every minute of it.

For teaching our children that continued friendships take some effort but they're always worth it, I am truly thankful.

little league might just kill me

1. We were told tonight that we had to buy a cup for our sons per Little League rules. I will admit that my first inclination was to think they meant a water bottle because "cups" are not part of my existence. Before I embarrassed myself, I realized what sort of cup they were talking about. So tomorrow will be a trip to the sports store to buy my first cup. I feel like such a man.

2. The coach remains MIA. The little league president called him today and couldn't get him, so he gets one more day before he gets the coaching boot. Remember the woman I told you about at Saturday's game? Her husband is going to be the coach if MIA Coach doesn't show up. Mac will be ready for MLB sooner rather than later. Seriously, this guy coached tonight and was very, very good and patient. He has decades of experience in Little League and is going to be great for our team.

3. They've added a Sunday practice. That means we'll have been at that ballfield last Saturday, Monday (yesterday), Tuesday (today), Wednesday (tomorrow), Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before - hopefully - there's a break. Do these people not have a life??? I might not have that much of a life either, but I'd like the option to eat dinner out once in awhile. I have too many other decisions to make so good for me that the options have been reduced to Friday.

"put me in coach. I'm ready to play"

Today was Opening Day for Summerville Little League. I thought Opening Day would mean they'd introduce the teams, somebody would sing the National Anthem off-key, we'd eat a hot dog and that would be it. But earlier in the week, I learned an actual game was involved. (They limited the season opener game to one hour apiece, but it was a game for the records nonetheless.)

Now you might be thinking that of course, they'd play on Opening Day. After all, that's what they've been practicing for, right?

Except that they only had 2 practices ahead of time. One practice was only attended by 3 players (one of whom was Mac). And the coach is out of town this week, so we haven't even met him. He wasn't even here for Opening Day.

If you understand what I'm saying, there was a lot of room for error. I mean, A MONUMENTAL LOT.The coach emailed everybody and told them to wear gray baseball pants and the team's red jersey. But there was no mention of matching belts and socks, so of course I cheaped out and bought white baseball socks at Wal-Mart to go with the cheap cleats I bought at Wal-Mart. (After all, we'll be lucky if he doesn't outgrow them before the season ends.)

I knew we needed a belt but I didn't have time to go to the sporting goods store before today, so after checking Wal-Mart (no baseball belts) and Target (no baseball belts), I decided to improvise and I just bought a belt in the boys' section of Target that sort of looked like a baseball belt and definitely could pass from a long distance for a baseball belt, but which was most definitely not a baseball belt. Thank goodness Jimmy wasn't here to witness this and Mac is too young to know better.

So Mac was fairly well-dressed for the part. And as we all know, he's a sucker for any activity that gets him a new uniform so he's loving the whole get-up.
Anyway, we show up and our team looks like we just got off the Island of Misfits. Every single person on the other team had their orange shirts, gray pants, orange socks and orange belts. They probably all had on matching orange underwear, too. Our team didn't even all have on gray baseball pants. Heck, not everybody on our team even had baseball pants on. But it wasn't a fashion show, right?

Our boys took the field first. Mac was in centerfield and was able to stop several hard hits (over the course of a couple innings). The other team clearly has been practicing batting for at least the last two months or else they are genetically predisposed to being Louisville Sluggers. It had the distinct feel and flavor of a David vs. Goliath situation.

When we finally got our first turn at batting, there was so little hitting that it was embarrassing. I mean really embarrasssing. In coach pitch, each batter gets 5 overhand pitches and if he doesn't hit any of them, he gets two soft pitches. If those aren't hit, he's out. (In the interest of time today - with the one-hour time limit on each game - they only did the first 5 pitches.) We may have seen 3 up, 3 down straight out of the box. It was pretty demoralizing as a parent who wants her son's team to do well.

The orange team's next at-bat was a repeat of the first. They hit hard, ran fast and didn't get any quick outs. But then something happened to our team at their next at-bat. They actually hit the ball and got on base. Spirits picked up and it really became a fun ballgame to watch because it wasn't so lopsided.

And Mac played his heart out. He had two opportunities to bat. He got out at first on the first bat (after a great hit) and made it safely to first on his second at-bat. He moved from centerfield to the pitcher position (it's coach pitch, so he didn't pitch but he played the position). And he assisted in the last out of the game by getting the ball and throwing it right to the first baseman. It was a great first game for him and he was thrilled with the whole thing.

There's always some little fly in the ointment in even the best situations and today was no different. There are definitely a couple parents on this team that are going to grate on my nerves before this is over. They clearly should have enrolled their sons in the Parks league, which is reportedly the more competitive league in town. Nothing suited them today: they're upset the coach wasn't there, they're upset that they only had 1 practice (they weren't among the 3 boys who showed up for the first practice) when some teams have been practicing for weeks; they're upset that the stand-in coach couldn't pitch better; they're upset that nobody taught the children every single baseball rule in the one hour of practice they had this week. The lady corrected everything her son did wrong, almost before he had a chance to make a "mistake." I intentionally tried to bother her by using my Upward training in applauding players from both teams on good plays, but I think it was lost on her. What I really wanted to do was tell her that these children are 7 years old and that they just need to be having fun and breathing fresh air and getting dirty, but she was sort of scary and I didn't think she'd take well to my advice. I saw her in a nurse's uniform the other day, so I'm hoping she's going to be working a lot of shifts when we have games so she can't rain on our parade.

All in all, a GREAT first day of baseball. I can't wait for Jimmy to get here next week to participate.

(And if they give an award to worst-dressed player, it won't go to Mac. We bought the red socks and belt after the game today!)

supper club

I've joined a little supper club of neighborhood women who meet once a month at one of their houses for dinner and conversation. Tonight is my turn to host, which leads to the dilemma of what to do with Mac. Supper Club starts at 7pm and Mac's bedtime is 7:30, so I told him he can stay downstairs to meet everybody for a couple minutes and then he must be banished to his room upstairs or else.

(The "else" being that I said we wouldn't leave for Disney World until Friday instead of tomorrow, and he actually believed me.)

Always one to love a party, he then asked if he might read a story to the ladies.

Um. No. (I mean, I do everything to encourage his reading, but this isn't a poetry open mike night.)

Then he asked if he might play the piano.

Um. Double NO on that one. Does he remember that he stopped taking lessons last month? He keeps playing this little song that he's made up over and over and over, and I think he thought tonight was going to be his big debut.

That made me remember our neighbors in Guadalajara. They were both dentists (he was the one who asked me if I'd ever thought about having a nose job or a boob job. But that's a story for another day.) The first time we went to their house, they made their son give us a concert. He was about 8 and maybe he was playing under duress or maybe not. I don't remember him as a child prodigy, just your average 8 year-old recreational piano player. In any event, he played and played and played that piano. There was no conversation during the performance. We just had to sit and listen attentively. And in our young newlywed life, Jimmy and I made a pact that we would never subject our guests to an 8 year-old's playing the piano. In honor of that pact, there will be no playing of the piano tonight.

another week in Story-land

I wish I had something terribly exciting to report. I don't. So I'm just typing. Because I don't want you to go away and not come back to The Story Tales.

If "mundanity" isn't a word, it should be. Mundanity: n. (picture of Mac and me) the art of living life in a mundane fashion with no drama or hijinks.

That's our life right now.

Mac goes to school. I do corn maze or other work. We come home. We do homework (which - not MUNDANITY - involves chapter books now! WOW!!). We go to football practice on Tuesday afternoons. We go to piano lessons on Thursday afternoons. We wait for the piano tuner to find time to tune our very out-of-tune piano (hopefully tomorrow!). We might start Cub Scouts after the organizational meeting on Thursday night so we think about buying the uniform (which is the only reason Mac is even considering joining). We go to flag football games on Saturday mornings. We figure out if we can possibly eat chicken nuggets and french fries one more time before my guilty conscience kicks in and I insist on something green. We give thanks that Chic-Fil-A is having a Pinewood Prep fundraiser night tomorrow night because it would be un-American or something not to eat more chicken nuggets and yummy waffle fries in support of Mac's school. We make A LOT of PB&J sandwiches because Pinewood lunch just isn't the same as Chapel! We count down days until Jimmy's first R&R in early October (NOT mundanity!). We play lots of Star Wars because Mac got a new Star Wars Lego kit. We count down days until Mac's November 20th birthday (it's about 59, more or less). We debate the merits of a Lego-themed birthday party and plan for the carrot cake birthday cake we'll have shaped like a Lego. We wonder if a platypus is a mammal (are marsupials mammals? This is why I could never homeschool!). We go to Gigi's farm and ride the four-wheeler and look for deer tracks. We come up with ideas for the children's hay bale maze at the corn maze. We debate whether we like the "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" book or movie better (book wins at our house). We read about knights and castles and talk about the castles we might see on our Christmas vacation in England. We hope for snow on our Christmas vacation in England. We learn interesting things from reading about knights, like mottes and moats and keeps and battering rams and coats of arms. We wonder whether the fishing worms are still alive in the fridge in the Zaxby's cup with a hole in the lid, but we're too afraid to check.

You get the picture. The beat goes on.

It's not so exciting, but it's life and it's ours and we are enjoying it. Mac loves football and he loves playing the black keys on the piano (those are the only ones he learned in his first piano lesson last Thursday and he's really taking that "practice 5 days a week" thing seriously so I hear A LOT of the black keys on an out-of-tune piano). He loves school and learning and his friends and his teachers.

Mundanity can be good.

the feeling of accomplishment

I will admit in 11+ years of marriage, I have learned to hand off the heavy lifting to Jimmy. Got a piece of furniture that needs to be moved? Before marriage, I would have shuffled it across the room by myself. After marriage, I would wait for Jimmy to help me if not watch him move it by himself.

I was a VERY self-sufficient girl before marriage and I'm having to grow my self-sufficiency legs back. I'll give you a couple examples, since I know you're a captive audience.

1. We have a queen-sized mattress on top of split boxsprings. Why might we have split boxsprings? Because we learned the hard way in Baltimore that a queen-sized boxspring does not turn corners to get up tight staircases. The problem with the split boxsprings is that our metal bedframe was missing that reinforcement leg in the middle that provides support from the floor up to the frame so we had some major sagging going on. Jimmy and I noticed before he left that we rolled into the middle, but it seemed easier to roll than to fix the problem. Until yesterday, when I got fed up and called the mattress store, asked for the best solution and was told what to buy at Lowe's. Then I went to Lowe's and had them cut the wood into the right size slats. Then I came home and heaved the mattress off and lifted the boxsprings off and laid down my wooden slats. And guess what? Last night there was no rolling, no distinct sagging, no hanging on to the edge of the mattress.

2. My bedroom in this rental house looks like a warehouse. Oprah says your bedroom is supposed to be a retreat. My bedroom is a retreat only if you like communing in Sam's or Home Depot. I have a dresser, a bed, two mismatched bedside tables (that aren't really supposed to be bedside tables so they're entirely too large for the space), a file cabinet, industrial shelving (that I was using before the dresser got here from storage, but now realize that I need at least a couple of the shelves), and a closet door that won't close because I have hanging shoe racks on either side of the door. In other words, it's a mess. But today I decided that if I moved the dresser over some, I could put a couple of the shelves on that same wall, cover it with a table cloth to hide the junk on the shelves and it wouldn't be quite so heinous. The problem is that there's a 26-inch television (the big, fat, heavy "old" kind and not a sleek flat screen that my 6 year-old can pick up) on top of a 5-drawer dresser that's packed to the gills. The dresser is sort of tall and I was scared to risk lifting the tv for fear that I'd drop it or get it down and not be able to get it back off the floor. So I did what any sensible person would do. I tried to push the whole combination. And guess what happened? NADA. That's right. It didn't budge. So I walked away and gave it some thought. And decided to wait until somebody stronger could come over and help me. And then the self-sufficiency thing kicked in and I decided I was not going to be beaten by a heavy dresser. Women lift cars off of their children nearly everyday, for crying out loud. So I kicked off my flipflops, squatted a little bit, put some shoulder into it, and the whole thing moved. I was able to push it about 3 inches before it (and I) just refused to go more. It still needs to go a couple more inches, but I can live with it the way it is for the time being.

So there is a feeling of self-satisfied accomplishment for getting some things done around here, but what I wouldn't give to have Jimmy here to do these things for me. And this time, I wouldn't take his muscles for granted nearly as much...

one of the benefits of living close to your neighbors!

As you may recall, our internet/cable/phone bundle isn't being installed until Monday because Time Warner Cable isn't so big on speedy delivery. After our McDonald's internet foray the other day, Jimmy climbed into bed with his laptop to watch a movie and - BIG SHOCKER - he had an internet connection. In Sao Paulo, we could barely get wireless to work from one room to another in our own apartment, so thank you, dear neighbors of White Gables! Courtesy of you, we have internet right now. Lest you think we're just moochers, you can steal from us starting next Monday!