Minor obsessions and second-child woes

You may have noticed that I ran out of new obsessions after a mere four-day week. Sorry, but I can only muster so many obsessions at once. I considered including baseball, but it's more a case of "vaguely more interested than I was before," which doesn't really count as an obsession. However, I do want to note that Dash's team finished their season in second place (out of three, but it was still an upset) and he clearly improved over the course of the eight weeks. We also went to a special Star-Wars-themed game of Real Baseball (i.e. Minor League pros) on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun, if somewhat marred by Mabel being absolutely terrified of the excellent fireworks display at the end.

But there was something very nice, I found, about the sense of community with the other parents, sitting in the evening warmth on the little bleachers beside the local little-league diamond, listening for the sweet metallic clunk as bat connected with ball, clapping and shouting for all the kids, yelling "Heads up!" when a ball went the wrong way, finding myself saying "He had a good inning" and realizing that I'd just used an idiom perfectly literally.

My view from the free seats

Of course, that only happened for one minute out of every five, because if I was there, Mabel was with me and I was mostly trying to keep her out of trouble as the minutes ticked towards and far past time for her to be safely tidied away from human interaction.

After the trophy presentation on Sunday - in which every child who participated got a trophy, of course - Mabel was enumerating the injustices of life once more. "I don't want to play soccer or baseball," she told me, "but it's not fair that Dash has four trophies and I have none."

She's right, it's not. Dash did three seasons of soccer and got a trophy at the end of each one, and now he has another. The unfairness comes from the fact that while I've offered Mabel the opportunity to play soccer for the past couple of years, I haven't really pushed it when she declined, because all those Saturday mornings are a pain in the ass, especially when the older child is/might be doing some other activity. So she gets the bad breaks of the second, and maybe of the girl, and that's not fair at all.

But if she wants to play T-ball next year, and Dash goes back to baseball, we might have logistical difficulties with conflicting schedules. Or, if they don't conflict, having to be somewhere four nights a week, which was hard enough for two. B and I both have our own evening commitments every now and then as well. (And I don't just mean a hot date with the sofa, a bottle of wine, and a Netflix, though lord knows that sounds lovely and is hard enough to come by.)

For the moment, I'm just tidying Dash's trophy collection onto a high shelf inside his closet and hoping she'll forget about it for a while.