Yesterday afternoon, Will and Evie were both acting especially restless, perhaps due to Daylight Savings and their wonkified schedule. I cancelled our planned trip to the grocery store and took them outside to play instead. Will wanted to play with the t-ball set my mom gave him for his birthday last year, so we took it and a blanket and some toys for Evie down to the grassy area behind our building.
Evie was completely and totally uninterested in the toys we gave her. She can play with toys inside. No, Evie wanted to eat grass. The grass is roughly the same color as cooked peas, so I guess it's not too surprising that she'd want to eat it, but still. When I stopped her from eating the blades she ripped from the ground, she screamed.
Will is surprisingly good at hitting the ball off the tee. I mean, it's not like he's hitting 90 mph fastballs at the age of two, but when he tries, he can make that plastic baseball go pretty far. When the neighbor girl (who is probably about seven) came outside, Will decided he really wanted her to play t-ball with him. But she was riding her bike. So she'd ride her bike past us, then Will would look at me and say, almost on the verge of tears, "Mommy, I want that girl to play t-ball with me." So I told him to ask her, maybe she'd say no, but maybe she'd say yes.
Will practices his home run trot
Will agreed that he should ask her. The next time she rode by on her bike, Will squatted down close to the grass, and whispered, "Hey girl, will you play t-ball with me?" But as he is not very tall, being only two, the squatting only made it so she didn't really see him. I'm sure whispering his request so quietly that I could barely make out his words didn't do much for his cause either. Then, when she was around the corner of the building, Will ran over to me and screamed, "THAT GIRL WON'T PLAY WITH ME! WHY WON'T SHE PLAY WITH ME?!" This scene repeated itself at least three times.
Then, after she rode by, still unable to hear his desperate pleas for a t-ball partner, he started doing this:
Woe is he.
Then, the girl went back to her apartment, only to emerge a few minutes later with her older brother, who is perhaps ten, and very sweet. The brother patted Will on the head and talked with him a little about t-ball, then told Will, "Someday you're going to be a pro baseball player."
And Will's little face crumpled. As they walked away, Will just stared after them sadly. Poor Will didn't know what the word "pro" meant, so he just assumed it meant something terrible and said, sadly, "Mommy, he say some words at me."* I explained to Will that "pro" was a good thing; that it meant someone who played baseball professionally, which meant as their job, like his favorite baseball player, Joe Mauer.** Then Will smiled, and laughed, and said, "Oh, that boy thinks I'll be like Joe Mauer. Why didn't he say so?"
*I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Will's phrase of choice when he thinks he's been wronged, or when he would just like you to leave him alone, is "Don't say some words at me!" and is often accompanied by him holding his hand up in front of him, as if he can deflect your offensive words with his tiny two-year-old palm.
**If you ask Will who his best friend is, nine times out of ten, he will say, "Joe Mauer!" enthusiastically. The other time he says, "Evie!" almost as enthuastically.
Then, when they came back, the little girl asked me how t-ball worked. Will was standing about 20 yards away, watching. I explained that you hit the ball off the tee with your bat, and when it's just a few of you that's all you really do, but when there are more kids it works more like actual baseball, but without a pitcher. (Yes, I do have a tendency to overexplain things to small children. She was probably just looking for me to say, "You hit the ball with the bat.") I handed her the bat and she hit the ball a couple times, all while Will stood like a statue in the distance. The kids thanked me and waved to Will, then went back in their apartment.
As soon as their door closed, Will came running over to me. "MOMMY! THAT GIRL PLAY WITH ME!!!!"
And Evie? Evie spent this entire time fighting with me over the grass.
