Dogpile

The things Jamie can build on mine-craft are insane.   I know it's technically a computer game, but it's so educational that when I let him build stuff while listening to his suzuki violin CD, I almost almost feel like we're masquerading as geniuses around here. 

The weather forecast betrayed me this week.  I have a wedding to shoot, Legoland to fieldtrip at, and a baseball game to cheer through with my might mom lungs.   Wouldn't you know it, all three of those days it's supposed to rain!  Gah.   Hopefully it will be the infamous Southern California storms of terror...i.e random sprinkles.

I'm used to boys.  I know first hand how hard it is for them to sit still.  How short their attention spans are.  How loud and sound effect-y they can be.   What I had never experienced before (until now), was a few hundred little boys hopped up on Pepsi, pizza and cupcakes, crammed into a school gymnasium for two hours with nothing to do.  Holy cow.  And the smell.  whoosh.   It was supposed to be caps night for our district's Little League (a fundraiser where we bid for our uniforms), but what it ended up being was somebody yelling incomprehensibly into a microphone while tons of tiny little man children bounced around like popcorn.  Jamie was suffering from sensory overload, but Charlie was in heaven.  I lost count of how many dogpiles I pulled his sweaty, smiling little body from.  They would just charge at each other, fists swinging, arms tackling.   A couple of (vastly outnumbered) girls wandered by to try and lecture some sense into the mosh pit of hooligans, but they would have had more luck arguing with the wind.   I'm not even sure the boys heard them.  In the end however, operation "get a uniform" was successful.   We won the navy blue and white ones.   I foresee lots of bleach in my future. 

We went to the awesomest birthday on Friday.   One of Robbie's friends turned one, and had a little man party!  It was so cute.   Jim was especially impressed with the chocolate cigars.

 

Violin lessons are on the polar opposite end from baseball.  Where baseball practice is loud, rough and dirty.  Violin is focused, careful and calm (except for the sound of dying cows).   Poor Jamie gets whiplash going straight from violin to baseball on Friday's.  He's doing really well though.  He no longer throws the ball backwards, and he even occasionally hits stuff and throws stuff where it's supposed to go.   With violin, he'd be perfectly happy making up tons of crappy music all day, instead of actually practicing his exercises like he's supposed to.   At this rate, Robbie will be counting "one-e-and-uh" before Jamie is.

Speaking of Robbie, he finally broke in his first teeth!  He's only been teething for the last six months (if the drooling and chewing were any indication), so it was about time.