The LIght at the End of the School Year

Howdy y'all - Y'know, I realize that my current fascination with the medium of film has meant fewer and fewer written updates make it into the blog. It's a tradeoff. The videos are time-consuming, and tell the story better than a thousand words. But for the sake of brevity and to keep my chops up, here's the latest in narrative form:

Q had a rough outing pitching on Saturday. He pitched one inning beautifully, with a strikeout and two putouts, but then in the second one he pitched, the fourth overall, he was tired. It was ninety degrees, and he was the only pitcher from either team asked to pitch two of the later innings. Everybody else pitched just one. He was spraying the ball all over the place, and a combination of hits and runs - plus a failure to keep a pop-up in his glove that was absolutely TRAGIC - meant that 5 runs, the maximum allowed, came in on his watch. He was brought to tears, but his coach, Allen Hall, had just the aboslute best reaction I could imagine: He picked him up and walked over to the shade with him, thus communicating "You are a little boy, and you're safe now with us" - and then stood him up and chucked him on the shoulder and talked sternly and positively about how proud he was of him and how well he'd done today, pitching in the heat like that, thus communicating "You are a man on this team and you're strong enough to get through this." It was just masterful. I caught the tail end of it on film...He's a great guy. And WSB won anyway, 21-6.

We had some batting practice this evening, and he's getting much better at that. The other day they worked up the numbers and it turned out he was hitting .200 on the season. Marked improvement as it's gone along, but a slump lately, and some re-jiggering of his stance bodes well for the future. We'll find out Thursday.

T had a playdate today that went on far too long. She returned tired and cranky and took it out on anything that moved around her. Luckily, I missed most of it, off as I was doing batting practice. But it was apparently pretty ugly. Unlike her - she is just the most adorable little thing ever, I must say. (And if that bothers you, you can go read somebody else's blog and see if they say about their own children, "Eh, OK I guess." I suspect you'll find that they don't.) She's taken to copying Q's latest kick, which is, on the nights when he is free to draw, he writes instead. He writes poems sometimes at night, or stories - he draws lines across the scrap paper we have for drawing and whips out narratives about his hero, Munk Munk, a mischevious monkey who goes around explaining how this or that came into being, being chased by witches, usually accompanied by his pal Bush Baby. I can't think of Munk Munk without picturing Karate Monkey, whose theme song goes like this:...Well, maybe I'll work that up on Garage Band this summer. Slap it up here as an MP3. But it's written, it's already in ny head.

T's stories almost always include a couple of little "mouses", as she calls them, and they're always in English. Usually the main plot is that someone asks someone else for a place to stay and / or permission to play with them. I've yet to see the request denied in any of her narratives. i should know, too - she dictates to us and we have to write the text over / under the illustrations.

Kids ran in the sprinkler today. Maybe I should go work up a film on that. Actually, I should go clear out the extra clothes Janneke got out of the closet and makred for my inspection pending their being piitched...I don't ever, ever wear them. Can't argue - they should go. But I need to approve it first.

What a weekend - hot, sticky, lots of yardwork and an hour and a half drive (the directions we got were bad - it should have been an hour) each way to Q's Saturday baseabll game. I am bushed. Come on, summer - we need ya pretty bad 'round here.