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Monday, October 10, 2011

Life Lessons

Here is my son, on his 9th birthday, putting on his Oakland Raiders Darren McFadden jersey.  He loves that jersey with all of his heart. 
Some may think it's silly to allow a child to invest that much time and energy into an NFL team (or any professional sports team for that matter) with their bad attitudes, insane salaries and giant egos, but the way I see it, you are only little once.  And I kind of think that a life without passion gets pretty boring.  I'll take the sports obsession over girls any day
Fast forward to tonight.  He'll be turning 12 this week.  I think that this jersey has easily been worn over 100 times in the last three years.  McFadden is the leading rusher in the NFL as of this week.  The Raiders are competitive this year.  KJ is so proud to wear it.
We had a softball game and he was playing football with his buddies while his dad and I played.  He took the jersey off because he didn't want it to get dirty.  He folded it up and put it in the dugout.  When it was time to go home, the jersey had disappeared.  Yes, out of our own dugout.  He is crushed.
My gut reaction was the be really upset with KJ for not taking better care of his stuff.  He had been waving it over his head and celebrating/bragging about McFadden's rushing yards.  I am a HUGE believer in personal responsibility, and all of this could have easily been avoided if he had just kept the stupid jersey on.  Or put it in the car.  He could have prevented this from happening.
But then I started thinking that I am placing all of the blame in him, the victim.  Sure, he could have kept the jersey on and he'd still have it.  But how sad is it that he couldn't trust that the darn thing wouldn't have disappeared right out of our dugout?
I hope hope hope that there was some misunderstanding and that it's going to show up in someone's bag.  But if it doesn't, you had better believe that he'll never be so naive and trusting again.
And that kind of breaks my heart.
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Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The end of an era

Sigh. My laptop is beginning the death rattle. It makes weird beeps and whistles. Sometimes it just shuts down because it feels like it. Sometimes it turns itself on in the middle of the night (Perhaps I should start calling it "Christine.") I fear we are nearing the end of our time together.
It's been a good laptop. It has edited hundreds of photos and stores thousands more. It has created many a digital scrapbook and written several honked off letters that were never mailed. It has played for hours on Webkinz, Build-a-Bear, Topps Town. It has researched fantasy football stats and how big the biggest snake in the world is, and how to make duct tape purses. It has been witness to more time on Facebook than I would care to admit, being a part of smart-aleck comments and copious over-sharing on my part.
I hope that my husband, fixer of all things technology-related, can squeeze some more life out of it.
But just in case he can't, I'm backing it up right now. I don't want to take any chances.
And the point of all of this is to test out the free Blogger app that I just downloaded to my iPad. It works, I think. :)
And now back to the Laptop. I can't have it getting jealous, you know.