My kid and Sports...

I know- I fail at bloggin’. (Hear my tribute to last night’s Academy of Country Music Awards show in there?) Anyway- I suck- it’s been 2 weeks and I just have ignored you.

So my eldest son was supposed to start Tball practice tonight but because of the rain- they cancelled. I’ve been pumped about this for months… maybe years? So it’s kind of a let down but after a long Monday at work- I’m a little relieved to get to go home and bake some homemade (tollhouse ready made actually) chocolate chip cookies and watch Everybody Loves Raymond. My husband is so sick of this show as I am of his damn NCIS.

Back to Tball- it’s always been a dream of mine to have a son and a beautiful son (Both accomplished over and over x3) and to have him play baseball because I love little league baseball. I always have. I never got to play sports because we were poor growing up and because my mother didn’t own a car. The only sport I did was cheerleading because I could ride my bike 2 or 3 miles to the city park 2x a week. The softball fields were on the other side of town and it took considerably longer to get there. And I’ll admit- part of that was that I was a little ‘too girly’ for softball. I couldn’t take my purse onto the field and when I swing a bat- I tend to turn in circles like I’m in ballet class.

Anyway, I was particularly jealous of girls who had parents in the stands rooting them on… so proud to see them. Parents who took them to away games. (I either missed away games or begged some girl who didn’t like me to let me ride with her parents and if I timed it right and a caring mother heard me, she’d let me despite that fact that her daughter thought of me as the weird girl who bought her uniform at a yard sale on Gray St. (True Story). So this is my childhood experience, although limited, with sports. In middle school I was a little more involved and did cheerleading in High School once my father took custody and cared a little bit better about what I did with my life.

So I always imagined I would be there rooting my sons (or daughters, if that had been the case) with a sweatshirt with ‘so and so’s mom #3’ embroidered on it. Or screen printed. Or whatever. So now I finally have a son who is of sports age. He’s played soccer and I coached his team. It was a disaster. My son hated soccer. Something about all the running and not enough food and tv. It really made me mad and Husband would say ‘You can’t get mad. He’s just 4 years old. If he doesn’t like it – he doesn’t like it.’ It baffles me how a child, A BOY for goodness sakes, could not enjoy running and having teammates and competing.

Clearly I’ve done something wrong. He’s soft. He only cares about spongebob. He thinks he’ll marry Miley Cyrus. He doesn’t like sports? I’m hanging onto this hope. Last week a neighborhood kid and I decided to have a Cove Circle Kickball game. This sounds like fun. We started off with small numbers but by the 5th inning- we were having a great time. George (Bestie’s Husband) Came to help us with his professional kickball skills and it was a good time.

MY SON, however, whined whenever someone got him out (or anyone out for that matter as this was unacceptable to him and mean) and he pouted nearly the whole game. Talk about frustration. THERES NO CRYING IN KICKBALL I kept shouting. How does this kid not love the thrill of this? He was the youngest on the field (er...cul-de-sac) but still… I don’t understand. What have I done not instill the joy of athleticism in him like I always dreamed?

The good news is that I have two more sons to work with and Mason’s only 1.5 but he’s got a hell of an arm!