baseball cards and monk costumes

Why on earth is the end of the school year so chaotic? We have 20 school days left, but you’d never know it based on how fast and furiously we’ve been going at life.

Sweet Thing learned how to ride a big boy bike.

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Yes, that’s without training wheels. He was 3 and [1 day shy of] 3/4 years old! I hauled the Schwinn Tiger up from the basement back on March 29th, intending to reattach the training wheels to that puppy, but Theo said he wanted to ride it like it was. The big brothers were still in school, so I said, “let’s give it a whirl,” and–miracle of miracles–he took off like a pro.

You could not have wiped the smile from my face…or from his either.

A sweet lady visiting a neighbor videotaped it on my phone and the whole afternoon was so huge in our world that I wrote a blog entry about it for the Mamas Against Drama site.

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worn out bicycle rider

Not one to be outdone athletically, Tucker perfected the art of the headstand later that evening.

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Dude held this position for 32 seconds. I timed it.

We took the boys to a Braves game where we sat on the 9th row behind home plate. The boys are utterly stadium-spoiled now.

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Chipper hit a homer on the very next pitch. Told you the seats weren’t bad…

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The baseball outing led to the rekindling of an obsession for Jackers: baseball cards. I have a shoe box full of them; they were my dad’s (or, more likely, my uncles’) and I eagerly skipped off to fetch them for Jack. What started as a bedtime diversion morphed into an incredible tromp down Memory Lane…

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1970 Thurman Munson. Be still my beating heart.

Lately his afternoons and nighttimes are filled with fantasy baseball team creating and baseball card sorting by team, by position, by year, by mascot–birds here, 4-footed creatures there, non-animals over here (looking at you, Phillie Phanatic)–you name it.

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I love helping them with the multiple levels of organization because I totally get it. Of course you stack all the catchers together. And then you re-sort them into Leagues. And after that, into teams. And I love this exercise because I did this same exact thing growing up (yes, I really was that cool).

Smell that? Summer’s coming.

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Behold: Harry Potter and Phillip Ransford, III (from Wendy Mass’s terrific book The Candymakers), ready to take Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day by storm…

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Again, it’s pretty scary what Mama can do with a glue gun (and a monk’s costume, which we just happened to have in the closet). Told you I was cool.

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Ever really wondered where caterpillars come from? Here is your biology lesson of the week: butterfly mating. Caught on camera.

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Um, right. Okey dokey, moving on.

Beethoven ain’t got nothing on this kid:

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Tucker waiting to belt out the best Chopsticks you’ve ever heard.

Future Academy Award winner right here:

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He is a [neon orange] Lorax, defender of trees, in the 2nd grade production at Trinity School.

Warm weather = water fights.

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Twenty days of school left. Ten more days until Mother’s Day (love me some Mother’s Day). Only 2 baseball games left for the 2 older boys until the playoffs start. One day until we take my parents to see The Eagles (Lord, please let them play “Lyin’ Eyes”). And only 16 days until Jackers turns 8. That means 16 more days of being even more nostalgic than I typically am.

May is such a huge month for us. It is our Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. It spins us and pulls us here and there and makes our stomachs drop. And we love every second.

Here’s to every day being May Day!