Batter up!

The baseball season has come to an end. Hayden has always liked baseball. He could hit a tossed (plastic) ball at 2. He cried at the end of his YMCA t-ball league last year. This year was a bit more realistic, at least as far as t-ball goes.

Hayden played in the Hamel baseball league. Hamel is basically a farm town in the suburbs, and the baseball league has a bit of a small town feel since it's surrounded by corn fields. It was a long season--from mid-May to mid-July. He even had a real team name (the Tigers), a jersey (a Tigers t-shirt with his name on the back), and a hat.

It was substantially more impressive than his hockey season. And cheaper too. Thanks to his cousins, we got free baseball pants and socks, a mitt, and a gift of real baseball batting gloves. And baseball warranted at least something of an attention span. At least while batting. Fielding...a different story. Hayden was usually the one kid not in "ready-position." He liked to spin around and twirl in the outfield. When playing a base position, he was mostly interested in reading the names off the opponents' jerseys. But he loved it. He loved going, he loved playing, he loved the after-game snack. And I preferred watching baseball over watching hockey. This may be insulting to native Minnesotans, but watching kids stuffed in equipment inside a cold ice rink has nothing on baseball on a sunny summer day.

After the last real game of the season, the kids got medals. GOLD medals. This last bit is important, as gold is MUCH better than any other color to a 5 year old. There's no doubt he'll be signing up for baseball again. The next experiment is soccer.... we'll keep you posted.

Backyard Nature

So we got some cheap goldfish for our pond. It was a pretty exciting event, and well worth the 4 bucks in goldfish. A few of the goldfish met their doom in the pond's pump, however...their bodies were discovered when Ben tried to fix the malfunctioning pump. Oh well. 4 bucks. Cycle of life and so forth. Other goldfish were not as foolhardy and wisely remained hidden in the lilypads until we coaxed them out with the skimmer. A few more like to hide out under the waterfall. Unfortunately, with the pump not working, I'm not sure how long the remaining survivors will hold out. It's getting a little stagnant in there without the waterfall. We may be making another trip to Petco in the near future. Still, it's the longest I've ever kept goldfish alive.

Goldfish carcasses aside, Hayden has really enjoyed watching them. They are amazingly fast little swimmers, but skittish. Like I said, they prefer to hide. He named all of them "Ace" for awhile. Then he kept changing their names.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the other frequent inhabitants of our yard are turtles. I saved one from the lawnmower a couple of weeks ago. Mostly we've found babies, but recently Hayden spotted a big one from our sun porch so we all went out to see it. Hayden figured it was the momma. I have no idea how you tell the difference between girl turtles and boy turtles...so momma it is. We found another one (or the same one?) in the front yard too, so we appear to have a thriving turtle population that may or may not dine on the dwindling goldfish population.

I finally found the section in the library on animals, so we'll have to learn about our wild neighbors and report back. It will be a while, because today at the library Hayden was more interested in books about space and dinosaurs, so information about turtles (and toads and fish) will have to be shelved until another day.