Ian's Intro to Baseball

Our next door neighbor offered us some Durham Bulls tickets for last Sunday, and I figured Ian is old enough to be able to sit and watch a game now. In fact, the previous week, I had bought him a tee, a ball, a bat, and a glove, and he can now actually hit the ball fairly solidly.
It is no small advantage for a small boy to live just a 10 minute walk from a ballpark, so we took advantage. We ended up arriving halfway through the first game of a doubleheader (which I didn't know about; the tickets said there was one game, but they made it a doubleheader to make up a previous rainout, starting the first game earlier). After watching for a while, we went to the concourse in search of food...but instead saw a woman offering face painting.

Here is Ian getting his face painted:


And then here he is sitting in the stands as a cow:


And here he is with his friend Madeline, who along with her dad accompanied us to the game:


I think he really enjoyed the whole experience. He liked watching the antics of Wool E. Bull, the mascot, although he has a history with Wool E. going back some time and preferred that he not get too close. He also enjoyed the Blue Monster (a guy in a blue monster suit whose tie-in is that the left field fence is fairly short and is therefore high - similar to the green fence in the Park-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named - and is named "The Blue Monster."), but again expressed concern at the thought of seeing him up close.

Ian is very attuned to social cues, and he heartily applauds and cheers when people around him do. He is also quickly learning the various parts of the game - where first base is, why the catcher squats (he squatted down himself and asked me, "Why does that man go like this?), that the guy behind the catcher is the umpire ("Daddy, is that a policeman?"), and why modern professional sports are a source of gender bias ("Daddy, why are there all boys playing the game? Do they have any girls?"). He is interested in the dugouts, because he knows that waiting one's turn is a relevant skill.

The one thing we did not have time to do was climb on the climbing maze in the children's playground in right field. I promised him we would come back some day and he could do it, but I later found out that last night (Tuesday) was the last home game of the season, so I bought some tickets (trust me, he would have remembered my promise).

We showed up an hour early, right when the gates opened, to have time to play, and after a timid start, he warmed right up to the maze. We then went to our seats:

It is amazing what $9 can buy you in a minor league park on no notice at all. It is not the Yankees, but the ability to walk from home, get there in 10 minutes, and sit four rows behind the home dugout for the price of a Yankee Stadium beer is pretty awesome.
I knew that there were to be fireworks after the game, and Ian insisted that we stay. The game ended by 9:30, which is way past his bedtime, but he was alert and well-behaved the whole time, and so I figured, why not? (That question is rhetorical for me, but may well have to be answered by his preschool teachers today. Well, that's why we pay the big bucks.)
After a few minutes of fireworks, he seemed to be getting tenser and tenser, and finally looked at me with a worried look and said, "Daddy, too many!" and buried his head in my shoulders.
So we beat a hasty retreat with me carrying Ian, his backpack, and his stroller down the smoke-filled (from the fireworks) stairs. He commented on the "'moke" and said he didn't like it. On the way home, we debriefed. He didn't appear to be traumatized by the fireworks, but he did say, "Maybe next time if we know there will be fireworks, we should bring a mask from home because of all the 'moke." (The sentences he weaves are really astounding.)