Are you ready for some T-ball?!

Yes, you read that right. Ethan is in t-ball AND soccer. Since I recently posted an article on our mothers of twins blog about "over-parenting" and this sort of over-scheduling was one of the topics... I feel the need to say that this was not planned. Though I am guilty of the "Brain Food for Kids" cookbook they listed, I am definitely not an over-scheduler. Ethan decided the night before registration, after over-hearing two of his neighborhood friends discussing it, that he too wanted to sign up. Steve said we needed to give him the chance to play it too, despite the over-scheduling issue. So here we are. Right now we are in four week over-lap hell. Meaning three hour long t-ball practices a week and two soccer games a week. I keep thinking about how we will live in the van when the twins start sports!

Tonight was a t-ball practice night and I took him. T-ball is a hard sport for this age. Harder than soccer where you are spending most of your time and energy chasing a ball. There is very little downtime. In t-ball, especially when you are just learning and instruction is being given to others, there is A LOT of downtime. Read: time to get bored and loose focus. Read further: sit on the ground, draw in the dirt and throw your glove up in the air and behind you... all during play. Here's the other difference I learned as I sat with the dads of the two neighbor friends, you don't yell encouragements or corrections to your son during t-ball like you do during soccer. One of the dads, Mike, coached his oldest son a while ago and told me, 'you just need to let the coaches handle it.' That is way harder than it sounds... for a second season soccer mom... okay, maybe it has nothing to do with soccer and more to do with my mommy instincts... AND my big mouth. (was that just a collective nod I sensed?)

Ethan definitely struggled, but some of that is he has never had interest in t-ball/baseball before so he doesn't understand what he needs to do. We have two awesome coaches. I'm not kidding, these guys are very serious, focused, driven, knowledgeable and great with these young kids. I was shocked by how different it is than soccer. It's good because there is no doubt Ethan will really learn some fundamentals, but still surprising because they are only five years old (is that the mommy thing again?!).

Camera phone images...

My little dirt drawer

I think he'll get the hang of it soon. He smiled a lot and seemed to enjoy it, and that is really all that matters.