Lee’s boss has season tickets to the Houston Astros’ baseball games. He had offered them to us twice and Lee said no both times. Last Friday Lee said yes, mainly because he didn’t want to offend his boss.
My usual response to things like that is “no way.” I don’t like doing anything that feels like more work than it’s worth (which is why we don’t have any pets right now!). Going anywhere with James is work. We say yes when we can because James loves to go lots of places (grocery store, his grandparents’ house, park, church …). But we say no a lot too—especially to new places where we have little control over the surroundings. But we decided to say yes to the baseball game.
We prepared the best we could. I packed our dinner and lots of snacks. We brought James’s noise reducing headphones. We booked parking ahead of time so we wouldn’t be driving around before the game trying to figure it out. We agreed we would only stay as long as we could—no expectation of making it to the seventh inning stretch. On Saturday we had a family over for lunch and David had play rehearsal from 2-5, so we had already had a busy day.
There were still some challenges. The parking garage was a mile away from the ballpark, and James wanted to be carried a lot (especially after the game). He didn’t understand that he couldn’t go on the field, and asked to “go downstairs” over and over. We only made it through three innings (but that was two hours, so we considered that long enough).
David isn’t a sport fan, so the highlight of the game for him was the cotton candy. I explained left field, center field, and right field to him and he said, “So it’s like stage left and stage right, right?” Yep. Exactly, theatre kid.
I’m glad we said yes to something new. I’m glad we kept our expectations low so we could focus on all the successes. I’m glad we prepared as much as we did.
