During this Time of Baseball, we spend 3 hours at a Saturday game, 2 hours at a Sunday practice, and 3 hours at weekday-evening game.  That, my friends, is a lot of baseball!  Tommy usually plays left field, so we set up just at the end of the safety fence (since we do have a little one who doesn't understand the "heads up!" command of the errant foul ball).


The weekday game is particularly tricky.  I get off work, pick up Tommy, get him dressed, drop him off at warm-up by 4:30, run and pick up Scotty, head back to the game which starts by 5:30, and wrangle The Monster solo until Erik arrives, directly after getting off work, sometime around 6:00.  We have been running around so much, and working all day, so dinner was nonexistent.

I was already making sure that I had snacks-on-hand and at least a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Tommy, so it was an inevitable conclusion that I would begin to pack a generous picnic for every game.  At 2 hours long and 20 minutes long, virtually every game crosses over some meal! 

Scotty usually makes "dessert" (which consists of flour, sugar, and chocolate chips mixed together with cornmeal ~ what I can say, he's working from whatever he finds in the jars on the counter) and I take leftovers and make a real dinner...no sammies, which now that I'm writing this seems like the obvious choice!  Instead, for this particular picnic, I put together canneloni, green salads, and homemade bread.  We eat like kings, basically, out of a basket and on the ground. 

It turns out, some of my favorite times have been with the three of us wadded up on a blanket, cheering on Our Boy.

(I noticed a diet Pepsi on the blanket above, and it reminds me that I've stopped drinking it.  Seriously.  People of earth, do you realize what this means?  I don't drink coffee, so diet Pepsi was IT.  I literally drank between 6 and 12 each day.  I know, right?!?  Crazy.  It was really my last vice, and now it's gone.  Farewell, diet Pepsi, I will miss you.  But I will carry on.  Just like when I gave up cigarettes in 1994, getting too drunk to stand in 1996, and high fructose corn syrup in 2010.  What can I say, my path to health has been a long one.  I'll give up sniffing glue next year, what do you say?  The truth is, I don't quit things lightly...I typically drop it like it's hot and never look back.)