Friends

It was a sunny afternoon, more or less, certainly more so than it has been the last few weeks. The kids and I went outside, and ran a few football drills in the backyard. I know, it's baseball season, we've got these three-player routes though.

Anyway, after doing that for a little while, the neighbors kids and their Mom were outside, so we invited them over. Kids played, we chatted, and somehow while talking about being at home with the kids, and not working in an office, she asked me if I had friends.

Kind of a strange question, although it made a little more sense in the context. Anyway I eventually said, well, most of my friends are the parents of kids in Jack and Kate's classes. Dads I meet through, oh, baseball coaching and whatnot. Used to make friends at work, Boston and Denver and so forth, but not so much with the working from home thing.

She went off on a tangent about her writing and such, while I thought about my lot. All the friends I make are other Dads! Oh sure there is the occasional fantasy football league mate, can't forget those guys. But mostly there's family and other Dads.

Your friends are usually the people you have stuff in common with. I guess that's why if I talk to high school friends, we generally talk about high school stuff, music and old movies maybe; college friends, we talk about, I dunno, the newspaper and drinking; twenty something friends, work. And today's friends, we talk about all that stuff, and our kids. Because really, that's how we became friends, and maybe why we're friends.

So as our neighbor's son busied himself digging a hole in our yard with a trowel, I reflected that the fact the people I coach baseball with, see movies with, and go out drinking with are generally people I meet through my kids just makes sense. We've got more in common with them than our immediate neighbors, sometimes.

I had a couple of other friends this week, of course. The ones I took to Dunkin Donuts on Monday, the Aquarium on Tuesday, and to meet their Mom for lunch on Wednesday. They're not just that, they're not mostly that, but if you spend enough time with someone, they become that. Goodnight, friends.

Whole lot of random

Couple weeks, what's been happening...

Both kids were sick with fevers and coughs for a couple of days, first Jack then Kate. So I had company. Watched the Spider-man movie (please! The Tobey Maguire one) with Jack, Cinderella with Kate. Jack was appropriately into it, we had held it back for a while thinking it might scare him. Hey, Willem Dafoe, scary even to me. Kate has seen Cinderella about 20 times,and its funny, she talks to the screen and gets angry at the stepsisters every time. I tell her Mommy has a nice stepsister and she says, "what?!"

We went to Great Wolf water park. Both may have ended the trip with slight relapses, swimming for two days in a heated water park migh do that. Kate missed two more days of school with an ear infection. It was sad when she was feverish and unhappy, she missed a play date she was really looking forward to, and also lamented missing Jam Band (I think that is what it's called). But we watched a movie and read some books (frog and Toad...doesn't get old), did some puzzles too. And when she was feeling better she made a nice painting. Painting and music, those are probably her two favorite things right now.

Jack is training for first communion, which involves us meeting with Pastor and several other families roughly every other week. I have brought him a few times, Emily some, Grandma last week. She said he mentioned Uncle Scott up in heaven as someone he would say a prayer for, which was nice.

Kate and I read Mouse Soup tonight. She laughed a lot at the story about the crickets.

Will try to write more often, because I forget stuff.

Games

Jack and I played football and baseball outside the last two days. It's been cold, but not icy, and we get outdoors when we can.

Jack likes watching football more, and at present he likes tossing the football around more, too. He says, and I can understand, that with baseball he wants to bat, which we can't really do in our yard (decent sized, but not big enough to really hit it). In any case, we spent 15 minutes throwing the baseball, which is relaxing and fun, especially watching how he has improved since last year. He's been doing a weekly Winter Clinic, and he's 8 instead of 7, so he's bigger, stronger, better.

But then we switched to football, and it's as different as the two are on TV. He runs almost non-stop, naarating plays (the zig-zag, the flea-flicker, etc.), then sprinting deep. He dives for almost everything, and catches a lot of them now. Much more so than he used to, just a few months ago. It will be interesting to see him playing baseball this year.

I also introduced him to sudoku puzzles yesterday, or he introduced them to us. He opened up the paper, we did the jumble, took a halfhearted stab at the Crossword, were basically mystified by the Cryptoquote -- how on Earth do people do these things? Then did the Sudoku, successfully, much to his satisfaction. He left a note next to my bed at night, which said, Don't read until tomorrow morning. I read it this morning: "Good morning Dad. Let's get the paper and do Sudoku! From Jack." And then a P.S. You are the best Dad ever. Uh but I don't want to brag. Well maybe a little.

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Kate and I played the Memory game today, which I think used to be called "concentration" (for you old folks out there). I will need to work with her a little on being a good sport, because not only did she totally kick my butt all over the place, but she laughed like Woody Woodpecker while doing it.

At each wrong guess on my part, I said, "Oh good grief," and she collapsed in laughter all over again.

I am not sure which one of us had more fun.