Boy Toys

As I've mentioned before we have a park across the street from our house. When Andy is in town, rain or shine, he'll spend about an hour a day at the park with the boy. A few days ago he came home amazed that even in the deep white snow Calvin was able to sniff out a baseball to bring home (he now has about 13 baseballs and 4 soccer balls that people have left at the park). Today Andy was gone, but Calvin wanted to play baseball so he started throwing the ball AT me.

Growing up my parents were big into quality family time, which usually meant some kind of sport. Since we had enough people in our family for our own teams, we would spend countless hours playing mostly basketball and softball. We had a huge bag of random baseball mitts and bats so that anytime we wanted to go to the park to play, we would grab the bag, invite a few friends, and go play a game. These times are among my fondest childhood memories, so this summer when I was yard-saleing and found a bunch of mitts for a dollar each, I snatched them up. Long lead-in to a short story. Today when Calvin was throwing the ball painfully at my face, my chest, my stomach, and even a knee cap, I ran to the garage and grabbed two of the baseball mitts. He thought I was the best mom EVER! We spent close to an hour throwing the ball back and forth, catching it with our mitts. At one point he ran and grabbed the camera, and stood there saying "cheese!" hence the picture below:

After he was tired of baseball, the girl was still asleep so we sat on the kitchen floor and shot Hot Wheels across the floor, watching them slide and crash. He would line them all up nicely and then we'd shoot them one by one with his car shooter (who knew those existed?).

We haven't had a Calvin day for a while, so it was fun to spend some quality time together. I look forward to all the pink and Barbies in my future, but there's nothing quite like a little boy and his love of baseball and matchbox cars.