T-Ball

We finally had a calm weekend with no housing woes. Everything works! We spent Friday cleaning up the house before heading out to the BB King/Buddy Guy show in Clearwater. We had a great time. It was great little venue with excellent seats regardless if you were in the front row or back row. Buddy Guy started the show and lived up to his reputation of being one of the best blues entertainers ever. He gets the crowd involved and even had an usher "play" his guitar. BB King was definitely moving slower than the last time I saw him now that he is 84 years young. He was a great storyteller and after the show was over we went down towards the stage and got to about the 4th row to get a better look. You can tell they both love what they do so much they pour their heart and soul into the show. It was great to get out but we didn't get home until after midnight, which was really late for us so used to getting up at 5 am. Our babysitter was equally tired and was found asleep on the couch when we got home. Once again Q was sleeping fine and there were no problems.

On Saturday we cleaned out our Florida room and turned it into Q's new playroom. It was quite successful and gives him a nice carpeted play area and relieves our living room of all the clutter. I had no idea what a hit it would as this morning as soon as he woke up he went running out to this new playroom. I think we may have discovered that he can entertain himself out there giving us a few minutes here and there of quiet time. While in the new playroom I busted out his T-ball set that he received for Christmas and was showing him how to hit. Much to my surprise he picked it up and is totally swinging the much to large for his size bat. I think we may be on to something. He is constantly getting compliments on his "arm" for velocity and accuracy. If we can get him started on the hand-eye coordination we might be in business here. Baseball is where the money is at. I was awful so I hope he has more natural talent than his old man did growing up. This morning he was right back at it with no help. I came out there and he was teeing the ball up and swinging for the fences. He cranked one right off the window so we may need to move this to an outdoor activity soon. He was so into it. He would get all excited upon hitting it that he would drop the bat and go looking for some high fives giggling and clapping. He's a ton of fun at this age. When you aren't chasing Mr. Disaster Making around he's tons of fun to play with.

We tried to get it on video but as soon as we took out the video camera Mr. Curiosity wants to play with the camera instead of being the talent. I will get some video of it this week and post it. Our camera hit full on the memory card and we are anxious about downloading it because in November we had Q's whole life, literally, on a shared networked hard drive that died. We lost everything. All the videos and all the pictures. Our wedding was on there. Q's birth, coming home, his first year; all of it was lost. Fortunately I have a computer guru friend, Sloppy Joe, that I sent the hard drive to and he was able to get quite a bit off. We lost the video, but he salvaged probably 85% of the pictures. It's hard to tell because you don't really know what you lost but he sent me a file with nearly 4,000 pictures on it. So here we are with a new hard drive and wondering if we really do want to hit the delete button on the camera. We will bite the bullet today at some point and just hope it works.

We had some old college friends from Madison stop by last night, that are also parents, so it was great fun to reconnect with them and trade parenting nightmare stories. Finally, another couple that isn't quite so rosy. It's good to know we share the same kinds of issues. Kids - it seems like a good idea at the time. "Oh, I can't wait to have a baby!" Then you realize it's not just adding a baby, but it means you are second or third or more realistically last - where ever that lands you on the priority list. I haven't even had a chance to get to my man room yet! They have a 5 year old and a 3.5 year old and said last night was their first over night trip away from the kids, so they were having a good time. One of their parents is now wintering down here in Florida. That gave them a babysitter for the night. What a great idea. If we could just get our parents (both please) to winter or year round it in Florida we'll be in business. (Note: We do not need to limit this arrangement to just parents. We are willing to drop our kid off for nights at a time with good friends and distant relatives if you want to move here).

We're fairly excited for the Super Bowl, at least all the food. With no Packers and no Steelers (Carrie's team) and no Favre it's going to be a "root-free" night. I guess I hope the Saints win - keep it in the NFC fellas, but I think they will likely get killed. We'll see. A shootout would be fun to watch. Here is a video of the dog being abused. All day long this is what Q does to Lucky.