Saturday, September 02, 2006

You make baseball fun!


Many people think heading out to the ballpark is not the ideal way to spend an evening. Ed and I are not among those people. We share a season ticket with several friends, and tonight was one of our games. For the most part, Connor seems to enjoy the games. After all, he can spit, clap, and scream and no one near him minds. He has developed a certain knack for charming the folks around us, and he can regularly get them to wave, clap, or just keep smiling back at him. Tonight was no exception.

The stadium was nearly empty, which is good for us because it means we can take up many seats, and Connor can crawl around freely - well, almost freely. Ed or I snatch him whenever he gets close to knocking some unsuspecting fan's drink over - or at least so far we've been able to thwart his efforts. About midway through the game, Connor had done enough entertaining for the evening and decided to fall asleep in my arms. Ed's jacket formed a perfect pillow, and Connor rested quite well. In the bottom of the 8th, the Nats were down 3-1. Zimmerman (my favorite player) came up to bat and belted one out of the park. Connor looked up, shoved his fist in the air, and promptly feel back to sleep. The score was now 3-2. Two batters later, another ball was belted out of the park with a runner on, which put the Nats in the lead. Connor's reaction was a bit different this time around. He looked up at me, rolled his eyes back like a teen-ager whose mom has just told her she better not miss curfew again, and closed them once more. It was sort of like he had one last hurrah in him and was willing to play along once, but a second cheer just wasn't worth the effort.

He woke up to see the last couple of batters in the ninth and seemed quite excited leaving the ballpark wrapped up in his little baseball teddy-bear blanket my mom made him, pointing at all the lights and people.

Elaine