Blast Ball

So, it would appear that I've gotten pretty terrible at coming up with things to post on here. I mostly blame Norah. When Gabe was at home every day, his hyperactivity tended to create many wonderful topics for posting. Norah, sadly, shares too many personality traits with me. We're both hilarious, obviously, but it's more a cerebral humor than physical, and capturing that sort of thing on video is pretty difficult. But we have had a few things going on in the past few weeks worth mentioning for friends and family who care.

This past school year, we've been trying, and mostly failing, to find extracurricular activities for the kids to participate in that they would actually enjoy. Last year, Gabe loved soccer. This year, he spent all of the time he was supposed to be playing his games standing (or sitting on the ground) next to the ref or the coach, trying to carry on a conversation during the games and wandering around doing his own thing during practices. So we gave up on that about halfway through the season. Norah has had her princess fair dance camp again all semester, but, as the semester has gone on, her interest in it has begun to wane. Fortunately, it's nearing completion as well, and there's a chance that she won't want to go back again next fall.

We could, of course, force the kids to participate if we wanted to, but, frankly, we don't think these things are important enough to warrant that kind of family tension. We really just want to find things that they are interested in doing instead of forcing them to do something they don't want to. I'm not sure which is the better life lesson, to be honest. Most of their lives they'll be forced to do things they don't want to, so teaching them early to figure out a way to get through it and have a little bit of fun, if possible, along the way would be valuable lessons to learn. On the other hand, if they can dedicate themselves to the things that the enjoy doing, then that seems like a win-win. Again, though, I get the feeling that whichever method we decided was best would end up being the worst in retrospect, so we might as well avoid the drama of trying to force them to do something they don't enjoy.

The next experiment for Norah is blast ball. It's like a dumbed down version of t-ball. Yeah. They dumbed down t-ball. It's for four year olds, mostly, and the concept is pretty basic. Each team gets a few turns in the field and at bat. They bat through the lineup once then switch teams. The team in the field scrambles around trying to get the ball after it's been hit (well, the two or three kids that are paying attention and whose parents have obviously spent time practicing catch with baseball gloves do, the other kids just whine or sit on the field or pick flowers or pester the coaches--Norah pesters the coaches, for the most part). The batter runs over to an air filled base that they get to jump on. The base squeaks when they jump on it, so they know they got there, I guess. And they do that for thirty minutes and then it's over.

We thought Norah would take to it pretty well since she likes catching and throwing balls and she's pretty good at hitting balls off the tee that we have in the yard. But her enthusiasm for the game that she has in our yard isn't really transferring well to the public setting.

This last one I added just because it was in the file there. Norah drew a picture of herself. The picture is, clearly, a little creepy in and of itself, but mostly I included it because of her evil mastermind smile and hand gestures that she was making while the picture was being taken.

She had a process this first day, where she had to draw a line next to the bag and then run through some little warmup type things before she would hit the ball. It was all very professional. 

This video doesn't have anything to do with blast ball. It's from Easter. And I'm including it to illustrate what a terrible parent I am. For some reason, Norah didn't want her picture taken, so this is what I did in response.