Willard Family Adventures: Take me out to the ballgame

On Thursday, we got an unexpected invitation to join our friends Jenny, Kyle, and their new daughter Katelynn, at the afternoon Twins game. I hesitated, since, as I've mentioned before, sitting still isn't a particular talent of Zach's. But, the tickets weren't going to be used if we didn't go, so I decided to give it a try, and hope we'd make it through a decent number of innings.

Let me set the stage a little... since Scott is a huge baseball fan, as soon as Zach started to talk, Scott started teaching him his "favorite" Twins players. "Go-go" was the easiest to say, so the nickname for Carlos Gomez (definitely not Scott's favorite) became Zach's immediate response. Not only to the question "who is your favorite Twins player?", but also any time he saw baseball (or football, if we're being honest) on tv, or anything having to do with baseball.

So, imagine when we showed up at the Metrodome. We were on the plaza outside, waiting for our friends, when we first saw a man in a Twins jersey. Zach promptly pointed at him and yelled "go-go!" The same once we got inside - all those players on the field - they were all "go-go". I pointed out Morneau, Span, Punto... some of the other players that Zach can name, but he just wanted to yell go-go. It was pretty funny.

The highlight for Zach was definitely when I took him down near the field before the game started, and was lucky enough to find TC (the Twins' mascot, a bear for some reason I don't understand) right below us. TC waved at Zach for a while, and he was mesmerized. When TC disappeared from sight, Zach said... "again?"

It turned out we made it through 5 innings. The first 3 or so were easy, Zach was very distracted by the singing of the anthem, the beginning of the game, cheering and clapping when everyone else did, and then eating. But once the food was gone and the novelty of the noise and motion wore off, the restlessness started. Up to that point, we'd been fortunate that there wasn't anyone sitting right in front of us. But a couple sat down at some point, and after Zach kicked the man in the back a few times (unintentionally) and then whacked him in the head (intentionally), I decided it was time to call the game.

So that was Zach's 4th baseball game, but his first this year. The last game we took him to was in Baltimore last August, and what a difference a year makes!!

Thanks to Kyle and Jenny for inviting us!

And while I lugged my camera all the way to the game, not only to get some snaps of Zach, but also of Katelynn's first baseball game, I got so distracted I never actually took it out of the bag! Ugh! But, later that night, we went over to Jenny and Kyle's, for our first proper meeting of Katelynn, so I managed to remember to take a few shots...