Baseball in the Park

Some days big brothers just need the opportunity to head outside and do something only big brothers can do, right? Tyler had been asking for days if we could go out and play baseball and we finally headed to the park to do just that.

Unfortunately, batting practice ended a little early for Tyler with frustrated cries of "I can't do it!" and tears that stung his little cheeks. (you can kind of see 'the look' in the picture above) For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what he meant. I mean, he was hitting the ball just fine off the tee. But every time he would hit it, he would hang his head and get frustrated and insist that he couldn't do it. Finally I asked him what it was he couldn't do. And he said "I can't hit far clear over there." And he pointed clear to the far end of the field. You know, the place you would hit the ball if you were to hit a home run. It dawned on me that, as we have spent many an evening watching the Major League Baseball playoffs recently, he wanted to hit the ball like "those guys". I tried to ensure him that he was doing a great job, was doing just fine, was the best baseball player I'd ever seen, etc. But to no avail, he didn't believe me and threw down his bat and said he was done. This was one of those strange moments for me. I of course think it's great to see my child want to strive for greatness and dream big, but I also want him to have fun along the way. I made a mental note that somehow I'll have to teach this kid that base hits are just as great as home runs...that consistent 'base hit' hitters are just as desireable (if not more) on a baseball team as are home run hitters...that sometimes we might strike out and it's okay--everybody does it sometimes, and sometimes we might reach first base from a walk, but at least we reached first base. And of course, he'll have to know that without walks and base hits, there'd rarely be RBI's and there'd definitely not ever be grand slams. So it looks like I've got some teaching to do with my big dreamer.
But for this day, we moved away from the plate and practiced playing catch. And as you can see, this was a much better option for Tyler. And we'll work on batting another day, I suppose.


And don't be fooled...these pictures were not taken yesterday or even this week for that matter. This was last week and our weather has changed much since then. On Monday we were pretty much home bound due to a blizzard--New Orleans style. We received something like 8 inches of rain in 12 hours (or thereabouts--I never got the official number) and there were flash flood warnings and schools getting out early and businesses shutting down. Garrett's firm even told their employees to head home early--I think that's a first! They said all day on the news to not go out unless you absolutely have to. It totally reminded me of the big snow storms we would get in Idaho, Utah, and Iowa. But lucky for us, we are not shoveling it out of the driveway and trudging through it in our snow boots today. And hopefully it's all out of Mother Nature's system now since we have family arriving starting tomorrow and we hope to part-ay for the next two weeks!