A fun first

 I'd never been to a Toledo Mud Hens (our local minor league baseball team) game. Some of our kids have through school, some of our kids could care less, and some only sit through baseball games under duress. I'll let you guess who's who, though that sentence makes it sound like we have six kids.

Anyway, tickets were available through work and Dada and I thought it'd be a fun night. The weather was gorgeous, Thing Three was thrilled to be going, and truth be told, I was looking forward to ballpark food. 

This is going to sound like a segue, but I promise it ties in. If you have Netflix, we recommend "Vivo" as a fun, family movie. I've seen it twice now and have watched some scenes on YouTube many times. There's a particular scene where the mom snarks something along the lines of, "oh, thank you, Montoya, for giving my kid an accordion." That's what was running through my mind when we got in the gate and the ushers were standing there with boxes of individually wrapped duck whistles. Not a kazoo, per se, but a kissin' cousin. To our 11 year old. Splennnndid. If you, like I was, are not sure how duck whistles tie in, here you go: mud hens are apparently a marsh bird AKA coots, which makes sense as this whole area's known as the Great Black Swamp. Anyway, that's what's in Damon's mouth in the picture below. I can just hear my Nana asking. And yes, the noise level was a mite ridiculous. Also yes, I've had to confiscate it out of his hoodie pocket before he headed off to school. 

Dada had been laughing all summer long about how rare grand slams had been the whole time he was growing up. Then Damon begins playing baseball and watching it on TV, and like the first three games he watches had grand slams. We tried to stress that they don't happen all the time and that it takes a lot of luck and skill to pull one off, etc. 

I bet you can guess where I'm headed with this.

Wouldn't you know it, the Mud Hens beat the Saints 8-1 that night, including a grand slam! Unbelievable. I have not heard that much excitement in person in a very long time. Sorry, Pirates fans. I'll try to not pour salt in your wounds. 

All in all, it was a great first experience and I hope we take better advantage of being this close in the future. Aside from some rather loud and sarcastic fans further behind us which evolved into setting an example where kids seated directly behind us began hollering, "youuuu suuuuuck" (which is not what the adult fans were yelling- they were actually funny), we had a great time. I was gratified to see that both our boys were annoyed by the screaming of rudeness. I figured they would be, but it's nice to see proof that you're parenting right sometimes, you know? They got a teachable lesson in how a few can ruin it (or at least lessen it) for the many and we didn't have to preach about it. We then got to reinforce some of the bright spots in Damon's season with how encouraging his own teammates and coaches had been and how important that was. 

So two thumbs up for ballpark fun and live entertainment, and free shipping to whomever would like the rest of our unopened duck whistles!