75 Days... not that I'm counting

We officially have 3rd and 1st graders! Maddie and Parker finished up their school years yesterday.

It is only the first day, but I am wondering if we've made a mistake planning our family vacation for the Fall...

We will get into a groove, I just hope it isn't a rut of arguments and sibling bickering followed by me screaming at the children and kicking them out of the house. Who's with me? Anyone? No?

September 3rd, here we come!

It was colder in Siberia...

YESTERDAY!!! Yup. 56 here, 61 there. How much of this can we endure? It's such a long, cold Spring, I keep wondering if we can go back and accept that Maryland job... It's mid-June and we still have the hot tub turned up over 100, and it's too cold!

What keeps us going is Eric's reignited baseball "career". Yes, Eric and yes, hardball. He joined the Liberty Bay Pirates this year. It's a national league for 18-50 year old men who don't want to play slow pitch. They've got wood bats and throw-back unis. We've outfitted ourselves with catcher's gear a go-go and he's out there recapturing age 18 again... Maybe with a few more aches and pains, but having fun none the less.

As a matter of fact, they had their first game this weekend and beat the South Kitsap Reds 11-2! Eric, solid as ever, went 3-5 with 2 singles(one was technically an error, but who's technical?) and a double. Fun to watch, fun to see him having such a blast.

He keeps telling me how good it feels to get out there again. Finally, he convinced me to take some batting practice off the machine. Now, it's been 15 years since I've done this. My ever-patient son sat at shortstop loudly whispering, "Strike 8... Strike 9..." Before I told him to shut up. Pathetically, it took me at least a dozen pitches to just tick one off. But then, I did. The first few were grounders that could have been fielded by any SS over 4 1/2 feet tall, luckily we didn't have one of those.

At one point, the kids were talking out in centerfield and I hit one squarely at them and (formerly) secretly took great joy in yelling out, "HEADS!" Then I had a flash back to these babies that I carried and cooed over, protected from all things scary or dangerous, and here I was hitting hardballs at their heads with an aluminum bat. Know what? One week later, still kinda funny. As a side note, always good to let your kids know you have tricks up your sleeve that they would never have imagined. They knew I'd played at some point in my looong life (but who cares what she did before we were born?) but had never seen it. Anyway, it gave me a touch of legitimacy when I boss them around. And it felt good.

Pirates game #2 this Saturday at Snider Park (where the kids play and I used to go watch Eric when we were first dating.) Talk about your trip down memory lane. Wish them luck and loose hamstrings.

Lessons from Parker

Parker is about a week out of his baseball season and has moved on to being Eric's team's official batboy. Whatever it takes to make the next 9 months pass between seasons. He get to attend his first baseball camp this summer with a group of team buddies from this year and last. He's jazzed beyond belief!

Our boy batted a .791 on the season with only 2 strikeouts in 43 at bats! As excited as Eric is by this number, I feel the wet blanket side of my personality rising up to wonder how long a kid can keep that up? No. No. No. The right response is that he'll only continue to improve, right? :)

He had a lot of fun this year, regardless of wins or losses. It was a lot of fun to watch because on our team, we tended to get a little caught up in scores and wins. But Parker never really cared about that. He celebrated great plays, by both himself and his team equally. He loved a good solid hit, a fast run. He probably walked away from 75% of the games asking, "Did we win? It felt like we won." Not that it mattered. Pretty great attitude, not just for the ball field either...

The Aisle Not Taken

I ran into a friend yesterday that I hadn't seen in a couple of years. We were very close in high school. We used to have the best time together.

But yesterday, here I was in the grocery store after picking Maddie up from school. Parker had just woken from a nap and I had carried him, shoeless, out to the car. Maddie was looking particularly haggard due to PE and I had just finished mowing the lawn (hadn't changed, blades of grass still stuck to my feet). Isn't this always when you run into someone you haven't seen in a while?

Anyway, she is living this very cool, nomadic sort of life - flying off to find jobs around the world, wherever the mood strikes. She had just returned from one such jaunt and was planning on leaving again in a week or so.

I looked at my cart full of children, fruit snacks, juice boxes and milk and wondered about the paths we all take in life and how two people who had really been close could end up in such unrelatable places. I was a touch jealous at the footloose nature of her life, but Maddie was stroking my fingers as we spoke. It was all good.

We said our goodbyes, with the obligatory we'll-talk-soons and headed off again in our truly different directions.

But before we left the store, I wheeled my sweaty self and grubby kids over to one of the ethnic food sections to buy something for dinner...

We got shot at (Or at least over...)

We made the yearly Memorial Day trip to the Soap Lake house again in 2008 for the Last Stand Rodeo and a little peace and quiet.

We decided to hit the road after Parker's baseball game Thursday night, which put us at the ferry terminal at 8:30... I'm not young enough or caught up on sleep enough to make night time road trips like we used to do in college. I was insanely crabby and begging for a hotel bed by the time we hit Ellensburg.

There's something about knowing you're going into a house that sits empty 99% of the time (bug and rodent phobia rising) in the dark, having to make beds, check closets, etc before you can settle down... We rolled in at 12:30 (kids awake BTW...)and proceeded into the house as quietly as possible, so as not to wake up the neighbors. Evidently, nothing is quiet enough not to wake said neighbor's dog because within two minutes of our arrival, kids in the house, me dragging sleeping bags and blankies out of the car, Eric and I hear a shot ring out. It went like this:
Me: "What the hell? Is he shooting at us?"
Eric: "Maybe it was a firework."
Me: "I'm getting in the house."
Eric (over the fence to neighbor who has just advanced through his garden with a gun in his hand): "H-h-h-ello Mr. James. It's Eric. M-m-m-ari and Wayne's son."
Mr. James: "Nobody told me you were coming. Shot into the air. Don't want to shoot no one for no good reason."
Eric: "T-t-t-hanks for watching out for the place. G-g-g-ood night, Mr. James."
Eric (to me in the house): "Yup. We were just shot at."

Now, let me sort of justify - this house has been in Eric's family for 50-ish years. It sits in a neighborhood that has had it's ups and downs and it has NEVER been messed with. Largely, I'm now sure, thanks to Mr. James. He watches out for it and now in his 80s (?) takes the shots from his porch, as opposed to coming over and looking who is there first. Not that it's okay that he fired off a round over our heads, but if you're going to have a house that sits empty for most of it's existence, he's the kind of neighbor you want to have.

So that was a first...

Everything else went without issue. Actually, everything after that was GREAT!

Maddie won the stick horse race and $5 for the 8-year-old division(Parker came in 2nd - to his recollection). Best part - the announcer calling the race in Maddie's favor halfway through. She was FLYING!

We had a family putt-putt golf contest. I don't want to brag, but it came down to a playoff hole and there again was a clear one-stroke winner. Since I'm writing this, I'll let you guess who psyched out her opponent at that last, all important hole.

Parker got his first try at fly-fishing and hooked into 2 good sized trout at Rocky Ford! For anyone who's been there, it's not an easy thing to do. Eric landed a few beautiful 24-inch trout himself.

We came across a baseball tournament in Ephrata that provided us hours of fun on Sunday and some REALLY good baseball. Home again, back to the grind. When can we go back?

May 2008 - Undefeated!

Well, we made it through another softball season. It was a (mostly) great experience. Eric and I coached Maddie's AA Fastpitch team - Swift Plumbing again, to Maddie's dismay. Some of you may remember she had the same sponsor last year and never got over me telling her their hats would be plungers. The team voted to call themselves the Swift Bulldogs... That worked to make everyone feel better.

It was a blast to watch the girls' skills develop over the course of those 2 months. Eric and I decided to really coach - demand the best out of the girls, even if it meant yelling and making them run laps. It really worked. The other coaches said, "We just want them to go have fun." Our argument was, how can they have fun if they don't know what to do? That just creates frustration and anxiety. We gave them the tools, worked on minute mechanics, ran situations until they were asking if we could just go run laps... But come game days, they showed up ready to play. Every single player stepped up to the plate and truly improved. And they were a team because we made them accountable to one another. They cheered each other on from the dugout and on the field. What a cool thing to watch develop!

The season wrapped up last week with our girls going 12-0! Undefeated! It was pretty exciting to see these girls realize their abilities. We decided to coach because Maddie had a coach last year tell us he wasn't going to teach them something because "they're just girls." To Eric and I, they were players and deserved to know what they were doing right and wrong. Was it always perfect? Absolutely not, but they learned and we hope this base that we gave them is something they will be able to build on for years to come. We had 6 of the 13 girls on our team that had never played organized fastpitch before. At the end of the season, 2 of the other coaches accused us of having a "stacked team." Eric got angry because he thought that wasn't giving the girls credit for all of the hard work they'd done. I think that was the ultimate compliment - going from never having played before to having a reputation around the league as All-Stars! You go, girls! Tune in for more on Parker's season...

February - California, here we come!

The kids and I headed South to Sacramento to get away from the long Winter here in Washington. It was not only weather related, we got to meet the newest addition to the Ruano family - 6 week old Lucas!

Rachel and Raf's house was like a citrus wonderland to our kids. With an abundance of orange and grapefruit trees, we didn't eat much else for the entire first day. Parker's face bore the brunt of the vitamin C O.D. We had to stop him from going out into the yard - he ate so much, he broke out! But even I couldn't lay off the fresh squeezed juice. Yum!

We spent a fun day in "Old Sac." Cruising the wooden sidewalks, checking out the old buildings, a "wild west shootout", the saltwater taffy store and some giant ice creams rounded out our first day.

We woke up the next morning Parker woke up with a 103' fever. That's always nice to do to a family with a newborn. Maybe we should have let him keep going with the oranges...

Regardless, we drugged him up and Raf treated us to a grand tour of San Francisco. The kids had an absolute blast at the Exploratorium. A pumped up science center that provided even a sick kid with 3 hours of fun! From there it was onto the marina district to get a view of Alcatraz - which the kids were well versed on thanks to Scooby-Doo Meets the San Fran-Psycho. This lead to a lot of questions about failed jailbreaks, why, where did they end up? Who wants to go to Fishermen's Wharf?

Here the kids got to ride on the double-decker merry-go-round and meet their first celebrity impersonator - Forrest Gump. They didn't quite get it, having not seen the movie, and especially that Mom encouraged them to take candy from this stranger's box of chocolates.

All in all it was a great long weekend. The kids loved spending time with Mati and singing songs with him (Wheels on the Bus again and again). Parker, feeling better, got to chase a flock of wild turkeys (turns out they don't defend themselves as geese would), Maddie got her hair done by someone who could actually make a french braid, Mom got to snuggle up baby Lucas and visit with her good friends. A fun time had by all. But we all missed Daddy and were glad to be home with him again.