Today the girls and I spent the morning at their school for a 3-on-3 basketball tournament. I'd talked a few young guys from the school where I teach into being "our" team in the tournament, and we went to cheer them on. While they didn't win, it was so fun being a part of an event like that, swarming with dads, brothers, uncles, and friends of the kids at the school. (Actually, the place was swarming with testosterone, and I have a feeling a lot of women looked at their sore, beaten, and scuffed up men tonight and said, "I'm not feeling sorry for you. You did this to yourself.") I had to smile at the two teams that made it all the way--probably the oldest guys in the tournament, who played like they were the featured game on ESPN. Age has this funny way of taking normal competitiveness and adding a dangerous element of still having something to prove. It makes me recall how often I saw my own dad lying on the living room floor, nursing a back that had spent too many games of racquetball putting some young whippersnapper in his place. :)
Then we went to an event that grouped kids by age, then rotated them through various baseball skills with the purpose of putting them on teams. We've never played baseball. Really, never. While I went to (and loved!) a lot of Orioles games growing up, and I know how to play and have participated in games for fun, I've never really liked playing baseball. There's too much time spent waiting for one's turn, and I'm kind of a play-all-the-time-and-play-hard kind of person. But the girls had seen a flier for this event and were interested, so we went.
And now they're signed up for baseball. I know--I was kind of caught up in the moment. It was fun to see them trying these skills for the first time and seeing them get excited. We'll see how it goes. The next step is to buy some baseball gloves, a bat, and a ball. And pray that our girls have an easier time waiting for their turns than their mother does. :)
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