Baseball at age 5

A couple of weeks ago Exo turned 5. He was excited about it for weeks and would proudly announce to anyone who asked that he was almost 5. Exo is a little guy with a ton of energy. He's short enough that he uses a booster seat at the table. He typically runs instead of walking and is known to jump from the furniture and attempts flips and standing on his head. He's also pretty smart, can write his name, and most days he can tell me what they worked on in Pre-K. He loves his little brother and smothers him with hugs and kisses.  He's super ticklish if you can catch him.

His birthday was a beautiful sunny fall afternoon and when I got home from work some friends were here eating ice cream in celebration. Because it was so nice and we had extra hands, we went outside to try some "baseball" with a big plastic bat and ball. Some cardboard that hasn't made it into the recycling worked as bases. Exo's instinct was to run to third base after getting a hit. Eventually he got it figured out, though he sometimes ran directly from first to third.  He just likes to run. At one point, all the kids were on base so we talked Christine into taking a turn with the bat while I held Joshua. Pretty soon the neighbors from across the street came over with their 3 year old boy who had been telling them since we got out there that he wanted to go play with those kids.

I wasn't in town for his birthday party the following Sunday but I heard stories about their baseball "game". The American family doing the pitching reported they were in the field while everyone else took turns batting and running the bases This time Mario got in on the action as well. A few days later I turned on the World Series so the family could see a real baseball game. Unfortunately the few innings we watched didn't have much action and no runs were scored. They were amazed at how the players snatched the ball out of the air with their gloves. The shots from the blimp brought several comments as well about the size of the stadium, the number of people there, and the number of cars.