This morning, we played one of the myriad pranks on our children that play out year round until they will eventually figure us out.  For St. Patrick’s Day, we set some Leprechaun traps (see last year’s elaborate Leprechaun Trap) and of course, they failed.  This morning, the kids came downstairs to find all kinds of toys, lamps and stools on top of tables and counters.  Powdered sugar was everywhere and those little buggers turned our milk green!  Those mischievous leprechauns got us again!

I started to take inventory of the various fictional characters we employ, partially for our childrens’ benefit, but primarily for sheer entertainment value.  There’s the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, Buggy Monsters and Halloween Spooks. What’s really intriguing is the questions our 5 year old asks us.  He’s very analytical and asks questions like how the tooth fairy gets in his room with windows closed and how the Leprechaun climbs up onto tabletops when he’s so little.  Yet he never figures out that it’s a big joke.  I wonder if some older kid in school will ruin it and tell him there’s no Santa, there’s no Leprechaun and the Tooth Fairy’s a hoax.  I wonder if when he figures out one, it will snap and he’ll realize they’re all fictional characters.

I don’t remember how I found out.  Do you?

How Have Your Children Reacted to Finding out?

With our kids off from school today, my wife put on a movie for the boys (5 and 3), but it wasn’t Disney and it wasn’t the usual cartoon fair.  She put one of the 1-year birthday videos I made for each sons just prior to their first birthday.  Even after seeing it several times, the kids still love watching their videos (and each other) and there’s just something “authentic” or heartwarming about watching them reminisce about being smaller and how silly we were with them and what it was like being a baby.  Without patting myself on the back too much (because I’m totally deficient in so many other facets of fatherhood and husbandry), I’m really glad I took the time and energy to put together these videos for the kids and I’ll have to do the same for our daughters as well, now 7 months.

Background: Throughout each of our kids’ first year, like many families, the video camera was on all the time and we took plenty of snapshots.  Now, that’s normally where it stops.  Most families have countless hours of video of their child’s first feeding, first roll, first steps, first word, etc., but it never gets put to good use – perhaps a YouTube vid forwarded to family members if anything.  Well, for whatever reason, leading up to our son’s first birthday, I was inspired enough to hunker down and spend probably 20-30 hours total split across a few weeks uploading and editing about 15 hours of video I had captured from his first year.  I figured out how to use some standard video editing software rather quickly and easily, tried out a few digital tricks, and I was on my way!  I’ve used Pinnacle and the Microsoft Movie Editing software for videos now.
I added several of our best shots and then envisioned a theme for the video.  I basically went through each major holiday and milestone, inserted video and pics, made sure to include all the family members I could muster up, and put music to the different sections.  These days, with massive archives of personal music and iTunes, it’s easy to get say, Christmas music for a winter section or a scary song for Halloween, etc.

At each first birthday party, with the whole family there, we put the video on and watched it together for the first time.  People were completely blown away and loved it.  Many, including my wife, cried at the end when I cycled back through the first year and said, “Kev’s growing up”.  I had one wedding planner ask me if I wanted to start doing videos for weddings.  It’s not that I had any great talent at all, nor did I have any prior experience.  It’s just that nobody takes the time to do this.  But, since this will be something our kids (and us) have forever, the grueling weeks of 1-2 hours a night in the basement toiling away at uploads and editing were well worth it.

Lessons Learned

Now that I’m about to start editing my third one, I’ve learned some important lessons I’d like to impart:

• Don’t get so wrapped up in perfectionism and editing each frame to perfectly coincide with a musical queue, digital tricks, etc.  This will end up taking up 80% of your time for only marginal benefit.  I learned this the hard way on my first video.
• Don’t keep watching your partial video hundreds of times throughout the editing process.  This wastes valuable time and drains your energy/creativity along the way.
• Do batch processing.  Download ALL the video at once, just let the tape run, record on your hard drive and go in and edit later.  This is much quicker than what I did the first time, which was to watch little bits and pieces on the camera and then decide to upload little snippets for inclusion in the video.
• DON’T MAKE YOUR VIDEO TOO LONG!!!…Especially if you want anyone else to watch it.  My first one was probably 30 minutes, second one 25.  I might make the next one 20 or so.  When you pop on a video for a party or perhaps another couple who’s thinking of doing the same thing, they don’t want to sit through a 3 hour compilation of every little thing you’ve captured.  I was at one party where someone put on a video which was practically an unedited running stream of 45 minutes of less than gripping video.  Everyone felt imprisoned and couldn’t just get up and leave but you could tell everyone was annoyed.  It’s much more effective for both immediate effect and subsequent viewing to have a nice story to tell – break up themes, and keep it relatively watchable.

Most Importantly – Just Do It!  Upon reading this, you may be one of the millions of moms or dads out there with hours and hours of footage and thousands of beautiful pictures just sitting on a hard drive or tapes somewhere.  Take the time and effort to chip away at this in a methodical fashion and your kids will love you for it.

So, following my initial post on getting started as a T Ball Assistant Coach (or Tee Ball, still haven’t figured out which is the “official” moniker) and my experience with my son peeing his pants and hunting pinecones, we’ve had canceled practices and games due to rain each week and finally got to enjoy a game last weekend. It was rather interesting and of course, amusing. We had kids playing in the dirt, picking their noses, forgetting that you need to have a glove on to catch the ball, and there was mass confusion over where to throw the ball.  Since this is all new to me and I’m sure there are some prospective T Ball coaches out there thinking the same thing I was when I signed up, here’s some Q&A for the uninitiated Assistant/Tee Ball Coach:

Is it a lot of work?

Not especially.  There’s not a lot of preparation required prior to game time.  The drills are pretty straightforward and easy to learn (more on that later).  The roster is pretty simple, and we don’t keep score.  You really just need to show up at game time and have a lot of patience.  Regarding whether you should be a T ball coach or Assistant coach, our league requires that you have some prior Assistant Coaching experience under your belt before being able to be the Head Coach.  I think this is a good idea.  Even though I played baseball as a kid, I didn’t start this young and I would make a much better coach for my next son having performed the assistant coach duties this year.

What Tee Ball Drills did we perform?

Since we only got a few practices in this year, we aren’t “hard core” like some other teams out there inevetibly are.  However, we started off with the following drills:

• Simple grounders - teaching them how to bend their knees, move to the ball, get the glove down and catch it.
• Throwing – getting them to step and throw, rather than just plant their feet and hurl it.  We had to focus on making an “L” with their arm and following through.
• Catching a thrown ball in the air – getting them to overcome their fear of being hit by the ball and moving their glove to the ball.  The coach said there are “eyes in the glove, and those eyes should always be looking at the ball”.
• Hitting - teaching them the basics of swinging.  Choking up where appropriate, how to stand, how to line up the knuckles, where to place the feet, and not to throw the bat too far after hitting!
• Throwing to first base – we started off our game telling them where to throw and trying to force the out, but since these guys don’t even understand the most basic aspects of the game just yet, it was evident this was too advanced and we switched to just having them throw to first base each time.  The key is getting the first baseman to know the balls coming and catch it!  He’s usually looking at dirt.
• Running the bases – Getting them to touch every base was pretty easy; it’s getting them to stop!  This was a good drill when it was 50 degrees out though.  Every 10 minutes we’d just tell them to run the bases 3 times so they’d stop complaining about how cold it was.
• Practice Time - Even though practices were scheduled for 2 hours each, we’d only practiced for 1 hour and called it quits.  After an hour, at 5, they’re pretty much fried.

What are some of the main Tee Ball rules that differ from typical Little League rules?

• 3 Innings only – instead of the 7, then 9 I remember playing as a kid.
• Every batter hits, no matter what happens with outs.  We just batted around each time.
• Rotate the kids each inning – we didn’t leave 1 kid in the same spot for 2 consecutive innings.
• We didn’t keep score.

Is Coaching T Ball Worth It?

Absolutely.  My son’s kind of shy and I think if I weren’t there to keep him engaged and make sure he’s paying attention, etc., he might not even want to play any more.  Being part of the practices and games keeps me in the loop on what we should work on at home too.  I usually can’t even get him to practice outside of the team practice/games since he’d rather be playing pirate or hunting insects, but tonight I was able to coax him into practicing a bit and he did a great job.  I’ve also started pitching to him a bit to prep him for next year when he’ll be up against a pitching machine.  I’m not one of those crazy competitive dads that wants my kid to be the best in the league (thankfully, I haven’t met that dad yet, but I know they’re out there, even at the T Ball level), but I’d love to see him stick with it and prosper.  Being good at something, especially a sport, breeds confidence, acts a source to make new friends and teaches him fair play, respect and team work.  Baseball was my game.  If it’s not his, well, he says he runs so fast that he “makes wind” – so track would be next!

What are your Funny Tee Ball experiences?

Since our kids are young and gullible, we try to seize the moment and do something silly each holiday.  Perhaps you’ll find some of these to be fun ideas to do with your kid…or you can shake your head at our family.  While Christmas is the proverbial Santa Claus and reindeer banging the heck out of the bells in the attic each year, St. Patty’s Day is all about leprechauns of course.  So, we decided we’d try and catch was a leprechaun during the course of the night and see if he’d leave us some gold.  This required a rather elaborate arrangement of course, because our 4-year old kept questioning how the trap would hold him, how much he weighed, how tall he was, etc.  After making it through the interrogation, we finally arrived at a suitable trap for the leprechaun.

Leprechaun Logic:

• First of all, it’s well-known that leprechauns are mischievous.  Therefore, we had to have something around that they’d want to make a mess out of – that’s the bait.
• I devised a trap using my kids’ toy tent and some yarn.
• I used the upstairs banister as the pulley to pull the tent up and trap the leprechaun should he be foolish enough to step into the tent.
• As bait, since we know they’re mischievous, we used a bag of foam blocks that any respectful leprechaun would want to knock down at first glance.
• Now, the trap is set.  And he bought it! We’ll see what happens tonight.

Here’s a visual demonstration:

In the morning, we intend on leaving a pile of gold coin chocolate candies in the trap.  The news will be bittersweet.  On one hand, it’s the leprechaun that got away.  On the other hand, he had to depart without his valued pot of gold!

I know, this is totally corny if you don’t have a kid at an age that will believe this stuff.  However, if you do, you’ll probably find this to be similarly amusing.

Please share your ridiculous holiday rituals; I’m sure there are some great ones out there!

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