The looks start out sweet. They take one look at the curly haired toddler peeking out from under a ball cap in the stroller and compliment my husband on raising the next generation of baseball fan. They look back at me and tell me how adorable my son is and then they take a closer look at the stroller. A quick glance at the bundle of pink tucked into the second seat of the double stroller and a look back at me and you know that they think we’re crazy. And they hope they don’t have to sit by us.
We check our stroller, tuck the baby into the carrier and grab the hand of the toddler and make our way to our seats. We squeeze past twelve fans to settle into seats 13 and 14 in the outfield. We are armed with snacks and cross our fingers that our very busy little boy finds baseball to be as enthralling as he did at the end of last season. We’re also hoping for a very sleepy infant who avoids a blowout diaper. We’re nervous. This is our first game as a family of four. Did we set ourselves up for disaster?
Our sweet usher hands our boy a ball from batting practice. We allow him to enjoy his new gift for a minute until he starts exhibiting signs of the desire to throw. Fearing for the noggins of those around us, that ball is confiscated and promptly hidden at the bottom of the diaper bag. The toddler surveys his surroundings and tries to take the beer out of the cup holder behind my seat and eyes the hair of the young lady in front of us.
We take turns squeezing out of the row to do diaper changes, grab dinner and give our guy a chance to run around. We meet up at the bottom of the eighth inning and realize that we’ve not just survived, but things went well. Our very busy toddler did a great job holding hands, our sweet infant slept through all of the stadium noise and the home team managed a win. We lavished praise on our exhausted little guy as we maneuvered the stroller back to the car. We couldn’t believe how well things went.
Then we remembered that we’ll be doing this almost 30 more times this season. That sounds crazy to us too. Crazy and so much fun.