P.E.

How to tire out even a very fit mom: Take her to a raquetball court and invent a game with a ball and complicated rules about where it must bounce and above all, make sure all players have to keep running around for the whole game. This gave me a whole new appreciation for pro basketball players. 10 minutes and I was whupped! The kids, of course, still had boundless energy.

Yesterday, the sun came out and we played "cul-de-sac baseball" which is the code word for baseball-with-no-rules, or more accurately, baseball with weird, fun, made-up rules. Like one of the kids playing broke his sandal and couldn't run the bases, so everytime he hit the ball, we all had to break into slow-motion (complete with slow-mo sound effects). And the person at the bottom of the cul-de-sac is the "drainer" and keeps the ball from going down the drain. Sometimes kids don't like to use mitts and use cardboard boxes to catch the ball. We call them the "boxers".

Boxers, drainers, slow-mo. Baseball, the way it's meant to be when you're a kid, like the sandlots that hardly exist anymore. With rules that change and no one really keeping score, everyone gets to play as much as they want, and no parents going ballistic in the stands. Baseball that gets played until it gets chilly out and the last bit of light eeks out of the sky and mom calls you in to dinner (except in our case, mom is on the pitcher's mound, because she's the only person guaranteed to not bean a batter with a fastball, and besides, she's not all that great at cooking dinner anyways)