Worst Spring Break Ever

This is photographic evidence of what my kids did during Spring Break last year. Thanks to a combination of my husband's inability to take time off work and something we'll call "the economy," my three boys and I spent the week exploring whatever free stuff Nashville offered. Come to find out, that's called a "staycation," and I was apparently ahead of the trend in family travel. When we weren't eating free birthday cake at the Belmont Mansion or climbing the walls at Ft. Negley, the boys got pretty bored outside. So while their friends were bragging about ski trips or Caribbean getaways, you can bet the big boys left out the details about how they Macgyvered our riding toys together.

Thanks to my parents, though, the twins will have something to brag about this year.
I'm sure that what happens in D.C. won't stay in D.C.!

Age is only a number, right?

When you’re planning to have a baby, you can't understand how important the baby’s birthdate will be.
For example, I learned the hard way that football season is not an ideal time to have a kid, as I had to plan my last C-section around that year’s SEC and Titans home schedules.
We have Big Orange friends whose second child was due in September a few years ago. The dad went to the UT game at Florida anyway, then high-tailed it back in time to see the baby’s head crowning.
Another factor to consider in family planning is youth league sports. Start researching before you get pregnant if you think you might encourage your baby to be an athlete. Find out the age cut-offs for each sport so you can avoid having your child “play up” a year.
“Play up” is a euphemism that means your boy who just turned 12 a month ago will have to step up to bat against a 14-year-old pitcher who sounds like James Earl Jones and is covered with hair. This happened to my next-door neighbor, who said her kid looked like an embryo next to that manchild.
In our baseball league, the birthday cut-off for different age divisions is Aug. 1. My twins were born July 1. So just when they were becoming mediocre in the 7-year-old division, they turned 8 and moved up from machine-pitch to kid-pitch with boys who are almost 10.
I suspect that kid-pitch is the best way dads could stretch an hour-long baseball game to two hours. At this level, coaches are less likely to switch kids around to different positions on the field so “everybody gets a chance.” Usually the boy who is the best athlete on the team, meaning the boy who can get the ball to the person he’s aiming for, is named the pitcher.
This child throws 45 to 55 pitches per inning because the rest of the team is made of boys like mine whose parents have told them they’re playing “for fun,” meaning three out of four will walk, strike out or foul off.
Fouling off is what dad-coaches do when my precious baby finally hits the ball and I start screaming because it looks like it’s going really, really far and, oh my gosh, he’s just getting to first base when some mean dad yells, “Foul ball!”
The hardest thing for me to stomach is the push for kids to be better athletes at a younger age. I almost had a stroke in 1995 when the NBA drafted Kevin Garnett straight out of high school. Now fifth-graders can have pitching coaches, eighth-graders are scouted and high-school phenoms regularly dominate the local sports page.
At this rate, birth announcements will include height, weight and batting average.