The day wasn’t going as planned. We had meant to go bowling. But after arriving to a local alley filled to capacity with senior citizens in the middle of a tournament, our plans changed. So after a couple vanilla milkshakes bought to stopper disappointed little boy tears, we found ourselves at the library. My youngest wandered over to the toys in the corner and my seven year old found himself next to me at a table with a stack of baseball reference books.
So we sat there awhile. Enjoying the cool and the calm inside the library.
And that’s when I looked over and stared at my son.
Bent over his books, he was lost in their words. His face still, thinking. His eyes beautiful and brown, liquid and lashed. A button nose; smooth, sweet skin. New over-sized teeth this way and that; cherry lifesaver lips biting, moving, grinning. Newly cut hair, light brown and so much like his father’s. And an enormous smile under crinkled eyes revealing his old soul, as if he’d been smiling for centuries and had perfected its art.
And staring as I was, I held my breath and willed myself not to fold him into my lap. A friend once described my son as being a little bit like a bird on a wire. When he settles next to you, you dare not disturb him in case he flies away. And while I didn’t fear that he would flee, I couldn’t startle this moment of still beauty.
My boy is amazing.
I am sure every parent stares at their child this way and comes to the very same conclusion. Of course they do. They have unearthed their own wonder of the world and are quite certain that there could be nothing more amazing. Ever. In the history of the universe. The end.
I also know that losing yourself in your child’s perfection is, at its core, a reflection of a parent’s own vanity too. But I couldn’t help it.
It blows my mind that I could have anything to do with something so fantastic. Really. Again considering myself in my child reveals even further vanity but forgive that and just humor me.
This boy came out of me. Me. Me?
He’s too perfect. Too exact and just so.Too much more than anything else.
I could hardly swing a B in math. I can’t see past my nose without my contacts. I slouch, I talk over people, I have a very bad habit of feeling sorry for myself. I never “applied myself enough” at school. And I believed the word “gullible” had been taken out of the of the dictionary for a very long time.
But I am still half responsible for THIS?
Impossible.
So I stared. I don’t think he noticed. He stayed put. Reading. Sharing a quick fact now and again.
And I waited. And watched.
Until his wonderful, bubbling bull in a china shop brother finally leaped up into my lap. He patted my cheeks and wound an arm around my neck and stage whispered about some Elmo toy over there in the corner. My youngest boy is a wonder in his own right. Pink cheeked, effused with glee, blue eyes alight, his body humming with motion. He shines joy and wonder and drama into every crack and crevice of any room. I find myself needing to step a few paces back at times – he is bright, beaming and often very overwhelming. He weighs down the wire and shamelessly radiates glory all around.
But when I looked back to my eldest, he had flown off into the stacks. His chair empty, the books gone. Eventually he peeked out and laughed at his brother. And then re-emerged, asking if we could go to the playground.
Our moment was over.
But my soul took flight and my heart soared. These moments remind me what I’m actually doing everyday. While I spend lots of time feeling sorry for myself (see above) about Groundhog Day and the challenges of entertaining little boys during the summer (uh muh guh, I need a vaca…), its moments like these that slap some sense into me. Maybe getting me to apply myself as a parent just a little bit more. Because low and behold, I am kind of responsible for guiding along the two most amazing things I will ever have any part in creating. And that’s kind of a big deal. So at attention. Long summer days or not, I’ve got some parenting to do.
My son loves baseball. He loves it so much in fact that I feel remiss as a mother and a blogger for not having mentioned this fact in detail here before. It is an enormous, entirely captivating, thoroughly significant part of his life, his thinking, his playing, his focus, his every day purpose.
You think I’m exaggerating.
My six year old has a battered, dog eared, ripped and taped coffee table book about ballparks that my mother gave him for his last birthday. It is now in three pieces, it’s binding completely unraveled. And he reminds me that it is out of date. Where is the new Yankee Stadium? Where is the new Nationals ballpark? When will they reprint it with the updates? I don’t know. He keeps paging through though, carefully organizing the pages that have slipped out, memorizing every picture and statistic.
Somehow, he has pilfered my father’s MLB.com login and password. And every morning, after spooning up his cereal and haphazardly pulling his uniform on, he runs over to the PC and checks last night’s scores. He watches replays. He pulls up teams. He checks old games and stats and player information. He calls me in to see a play. “Mom! Check out this walk off home run!”
In the backseat of my car, there are two copies of Sports Illustrated – worn, weary and coverless. But they have all of the 2010 MLB stats and player information. He reads them on his way home from school every single day.
We have a pitch-back positioned up against our backyard’s back woods and a home plate lying there in the grass. First base lies up against the fence of the empty house next door. (The fence is our “Green Monster”, the abandoned yard is our “Sandlot” – just replace the dog in the movie with snakes, rabbits and armadillos.) Second base is in front of my dining room window. Third base lies in front of the back porch. If he doesn’t have school, my six year old pulls open the slider and runs out to our backyard ball field before the sun has even peeked up over the trees. And then, one after the other, he throws tennis balls into the air and cracks them up over the house. Over and over and over. And after each hit, he talks and cheers and yells the play by play to himself as he rounds the bases. Over and over and over.
There is also a “Mommy base”, where my folding lounge chair is positioned in left field. My three year old always makes a stop there as he rounds the bases. You know, just for a quick snuggle and chatty recap about the game in play. My six year old does not stop however. There is no “Mommy base” in the MLB.
On weekend evenings, he begs. “Just one more inning, Mommy. Just one more. Please.” And so our nights are filled with MLB baseball, no matter the team. Repetitive pitches, fouls, outs, man scratching, commentators mentioning historic facts as filler, spitting, swinging, staring, nothing happens. He remains focused while my husband and I wander away to make dinner. And suddenly there is a double play, the inning is over. He jumps up and down and races around the house and gives my husband and I high fives while we simmer veggies on the stove. What just happened? He is happy to reenact it on the hard wood floor – dives, catches, slides, it’s the most exciting thing in the whole wide world.
Do you know where the oldest ballpark in the country is? Do you know the entire line-up for the Tampa Bay Rays and the Boston Red Sox? Do you know the oldest team in the country? Do you know who won the first world series? I don’t. But my son does.
Do you know how much space a full length MLB game takes up on a DVR? He records games every day. And we quietly erase them a few days after that.
Guess where he’s celebrating his 7th birthday? Predictably, in the parking lot of the Trop before a Rays game. Baseball cupcakes, friends with their gloves, sneaking down to the edge of the field to watch warm ups, climbing up to nosebleed seats to watch the game, Lets Go Rays!
We just finished our Little League season where he played on a local coach pitch team. Proudly. He would practice before his games and perfect his slides on the dining room floor. He remained stoically “baseball ready” in the outfield. He dove and rolled for any catch that he could, certainly re-enacting some highlight or another. When ready to hit, he would twirl his bat before the pitch – also something he had obviously seen somewhere before. In the dugout he clung to the fence, staring, watching, jumping in place nervously. He counted the plays, disagreed with calls (later, while being tucked into bed), slid into bases, dove, swung, ran, tagged and tried so so hard. He wasn’t the best player and he wasn’t the squeakiest wheel – but he adored every single moment.
I just signed him up from baseball summer camp. And once school is back in session, there will be Fall Ball too. Again.
It’s a whole new world for me. And I want to be entirely into it with him – but I tapped out of sports about as fast as it took a well aimed kickball to knock the glasses off my wee first grade face many decades ago. I didn’t know the difference between a hit and a run until this Little League season. And is there a difference between a “double” and a “double play”? I’m pretty sure there is.
But I’m trying. And adoring his passion and irrepressible glee for it. And screaming “Way to go baby!!!” from behind the chain link fence at the ball park. And searching for foul balls in our snake infested “Sandlot”. And pitching (no matter how often I’m labeled a “belly itcher” rather than an actual pitcher). And counting up his gear and shaking dirt out of his cleats and washing his uniform and slowing the cart down through the baseball aisle every single time. And sitting through inning after inning, with him snuggled at my side, hanging on his translated play by play.
I’m really trying. And loving it. And always always baseball ready for my wonderful boy.
I had no idea. I guess I had vaguely seen brightly colored kinked plastic bracelets on kids in passing at Little League, at the grocery store, just around. I thought they were just some new kind of jelly bracelet. And something girls were into. I have two boys who have zero preference about what they wear EVER. So bracelets just weren’t on my radar screen.
Plus my six year old is kind of a serious, by the book, I want to do my own thing kind of kid. Peer pressure has yet to sway him too much.
But recently he has been untethering his independence. And shrugging on the language of a grown up kid.
“Mom that is so awesome, did you see that play? So cool. Dude.”
And I’ve been seeing him goof off in the dug out and wrestle his friends to the ground at the park and yell out the open car window at friends: “Hey! Ryan! Matthew G.! Hey you guys!!! Over here!”
This is nothing like my timid, skirt clinger who hid under a table for his first two months of preschool.
And this is a good thing.
But the other day, my boy watched a pack of kinky braceleted kids walk by. He turned and looked up at me.
“Mom. You know those Silly Bands?”
“Those what?”
“Silly Bands. …They’re cool.”
“Oh yeah?”
He had grabbed my attention. Because in my mind, my sweet boy was perpetually hiding under the world’s table, yet to really peer out. His teachers describe him as very quiet. A good boy. Bright, straight As, certainly the least of their concerns. But my husband and I always worry about how it all goes down with his peers. We fret over his “cool” factor. And were we doing anything at all to encourage or maintain it?
So these Silly Bands. They are indeed a new version of jelly bracelets but apparently every one of his friends wear them at school. And when you take them off, they make shapes. And sometimes glow in the dark. They’re cool. I guess.
“Do you want some too?”
“Yeah.”
So after dropping him off at school yesterday, I pulled up to Walgreens. Their digital billboard outside blinked that they had just received a new shipment of Silly Bands. Huh. Am I the LAST person to know about these things?
I walked in. I couldn’t find them. I walked up to the twice my aged cashier, half dozing on his stool. “I’m looking for these… um…” and started touching my wrists. Before I could spit out the word “bracelet”, he pointed me to a bin at his right.
“Silly Bands. Oh I know all about those. Fastest selling things in the store.”
Even the guy two times my age at Walgreens was more current than I am. Ok then. I grabbed two packs.
And while the “letter” ones I had picked out apparently aren’t as cool as the animals or other shaped ones, my six year old carefully put each colored band on. He practiced walked around the house, staring down at his wrists. He kept stopping, taking them off, arranging them in rows, and putting them back on. We made a special ziploc bag for them. We talked about which ones the other kids had. And this morning, he put them all back on. Coolness checked and rechecked, he stomped out the door, backpack bouncing behind him. And I caught him glance down at his wrists one more time before he was gone.
I should know better. I remember jelly bracelets and slap bands and garbage pail kids and sticker albums. I remember how badly I wanted to be able to have some reference of cool in first grade. I remember wanting to “get it”.
So while I’m not rushing out buying every Wii game the other kids have or electronic whatever just so my kid maintains his cool, I think investing a few bucks in some strange little plastic bracelets so my kid feels like he can be part of something is absolutely worth it.
I have no idea where he got the idea. But my three year old decided he was jacked this morning. Ripped, cut and totally rocking it for me. Did this kid get muscle milk in his cereal this morning? And like any overly pumped far too stoked on himself dude, he started posing down – with newly sprouted muscles to boot.
I’m thinking we need a little cheer around here. A little holiday cheer, in fact. And as the wonderful Buddy the Elf would say:
“The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.”
And so, here are my boys singing loud for all to hear.
When they aren’t showing off, being silly and singing gibberish. Or saying their favorite word “stinky” or laughing about farts.
(Hey. Don’t judge me. When you throw two little boys in front of a camera, already frothed up on sugar cookies, candy canes and Christmas anticipation, you just never know what you’re going to get.)
It has been one of those mornings. We have had absolutely nothing on our agenda and my boys are bored. Four walls, inside, too much TV, punching, wrestling, screaming… it just doesn’t work.
So I herded them outside with no idea what we’d do.
And then I found an old tube of bubbles I had bought months (years?) ago. And that was all we needed. Bubbles. We must have played with them for over a half hour.
Indulge me and enjoy this video of my boys playing together with bubbles. Sure, this video is hardly going to go viral anytime soon. It’s just two boys playing. But there is beauty in it. Ok ok, I’m know I am SO being their mom right now. But look carefully. It’s the simple stuff, people. Just brothers, playing. Hanging out. On a Sunday morning. From the depths of my way-too-mommy-biased heart, I always cherish moments like these.
So, like many bloggers out there right now – I’m packing. But this doesn’t exactly look like the kinds of things most of us would be packing for BlogHer, does it? You know what I’m talking about: the cute dresses, shoes, cameras, computer paraphenalia and casual but confident conference outfits… Nope, these things look suspiciously “little boy-ish”. So why is that? Well, I’m actually not headed to BlogHer this year.
I almost was. My husband bought me a ticket for Christmas in fact. I was beyond thrilled. I couldn’t wait. Last year was phenomenal and now this year, having met so many more blogging bas-asses, I knew would be even better. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait!
But then we got a call. My wonderful sister in law announced that she’s getting married! And the date has been specially chosen to be on her grandparent’s anniversary. Friday, July 25th. We were thrilled for her. We love her and her husband to be. Plus this is the last family wedding for a long while, we all would be together and we all couldn’t wait.
Just. No BlogHer this year, that’s all.
I put the word out on Twitter I wasn’t going and I sold my ticket within days. But what we saved from that actually paid for my blog makeover awhile back. So it’s all good.
Anyhoo, I thought I would post here to explain my absence. If. Just in case. It’s at all. Noticed. Heh.
Anyway, while you all are lining up to get your creds, I’ll be lining up my two sons and husband in their crisp tuxes, readying them for a trip down the aisle to stand besides my sister in law and her husband to be.
And certainly, if you know my children at all by now, you are probably wondering how tuxes and slow, behaved walking down an aisle will work out. Yeah. I’ll keep you posted. No doubt, hilarity will ensue and I will be typing about their shenanigans in the coming week.
And if I don’t? It’s because I’m keeeerazy busy doing the family thing, the driving 12 hours one way thing, the keeping my kids from pushing their cousin into the pool thing, the general wacky uber exhausting vacation… thing.
But to all my blogging peeps heading to Chicago, ENJOY BLOGHER! I can’t wait to read your posts. And if I don’t see any of you at the Type A Mom Conference in September, I will certainly see you next year at BlogHer.
Bent over his books, he was lost in their words. His face still, thinking. His eyes beautiful and brown, liquid and lashed. A button nose; smooth, sweet skin. New over-sized teeth this way and that; cherry lifesaver lips biting, moving, grinning. Newly cut hair, light brown and so much like his father’s. And an enormous smile under crinkled eyes revealing his old soul, as if he’d been smiling for centuries and had perfected its art.
So, like many bloggers out there right now – I’m packing. But this doesn’t exactly look like the kinds of things most of us would be packing for 
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