Toddlers and Tiaras

As we head into the final quarter of our stay in DC, our very favorite family of four (other than us obviously) came to visit and remind us exactly what we’re missing.  Ryan, Emelie, Maggie and Alice Nelson came to visit and we couldn’t have been more excited.  Good couple friends are hard to find, but these guys fit us like a glove.  Ryan and I are proud nerds who grew up playing chess and Nintendo Techmo Bowl.  We both married up to two fabulous ladies who have worked at non-profits, for-profits and local government, who sort of qualify as a negative profit.  Brynn and Maggie are super-genius three year olds who are destined to take over the world and their younger siblings are the two cutest kids ever to walk planet Earth.  Don’t argue, I’m totally right.

So with one kid per adult, we planned a man-man defense and packed the schedule.  I rented a Chrysler Town and Country like any good soccer Dad, picked up the crew at 11:30 pm and 6 hours later, the weekend had begun.  Zoo, museums, Mount Vernon, massages, monuments.  We had to take pictures or else we wouldn’t have remembered it.  I’m still a little fuzzy on the details, but here’s my recollection.

When you travel with kids, you bring a purse or wallet full of things for yourself and 100 lbs of gear for your kids.  This includes, but is not limited to: stroller, mid-morning snack, toys, wet wipes, lunch, bottles, formula, mid-afternoon snack, pacifier, diapers and the patience of a saint running a terrier orphanage.  Needless to say, it took a while to get the Walker-Nelson machine moving every morning.  When we did get going though, we had an awesome time.  We started with the zoo on Friday, hit up museums and monuments on the Smithsonian mall on Saturday, Mount Vernon on Sunday and for good measure, George Washington’s gristmill and distillery before heading to the airport.  The kids were champs and we got a number of great pictures and they ran all over Northern Virginia and DC.

The best part of the weekend though was probably when we were home after four exhausted kids had gone to bed.  Ryan introduced me to The Walking Dead, we laughed loudly while watching Modern Family and enjoyed comparing stories of being frustrated, proud and just plain exhausted by our kids every day.  When we had regular Sunday night dinners (sequel coming soon in January 2013), this was always the best part of my week. 

Seeing the Nelsons reminded us of what we’re really missing out here: family and friends.  They let us borrow their daughter to be our practice baby before Brynn came along, they watched Brynn when Jonah was born and we started a Sunday night dinner tradition that’s been going strong since January 2011.  It doesn’t get much better than the Nelsons as far as we’re concerned and we can’t wait to bring the crazy every Sunday night in 2013.

Good Baseball

Camden Yards

Baseball has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember.  My dad was a huge Cardinals fan and I played baseball two seasons every year for the first six baseball playing years of my life.  I grew up in Houston and Wyoming, so I pledge allegiance to the Astros and Rockies every year; two of the worst teams in baseball.  It’s usually a fairly miserable existence during the summer.  The only relief comes with the noise of football season that drowns out things like children, presidential elections and mercifully: baseball.

Camden Yards is a lot more
fun when there's no
torrential downpour.  

So when I left Colorado for DC, I braced myself to leave one bad team for two perennially terrible teams.  In 2010, the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles were a combined 135-189, making them two of the worst teams in the league.  The one positive was that I was looking forward to seeing two ballparks I’d never been too, especially Camden Yards.  That’s where my all time favorite player, Cal Ripken Jr. finished his iron-man record of consecutive games played at 2,632.  This year had some promise to be different though.  The Nationals made trades for Gio Gonzales and Edwin Jackson on top of having a couple of young stud pitchers, Strasburg and Zimmerman.  The Orioles fired their manager halfway through 2011 and then went on a tear with their new manager, Buck Showalter, hoping to bring that momentum into 2012.

The promise became reality pretty quickly.  For the past six months, I’ve been in baseball heaven.  The Nationals finished the 2012 season with the best record in baseball and the Orioles were in a pennant race with the Yankees all year long and secured a wild card spot.  Strasburg and Harper had historically great rookie years for the Nationals, and the Orioles finished 24 games over .500 with only a +7 run differential, going 29-9 in one run games with an amazing bullpen and clutch late inning at bats. 

Presidents Race!

The best moment was on the last day of the season. I played hooky with a couple guys from work to watch the last Nationals game.  They were still playing for home field advantage throughout the NL playoffs, so all the starters were out there and the crowd was amped.  Someone else still had something to play for: Teddy Roosevelt.  Every game for seven years, Teddy has not been allowed to win the infamous Presidents Race, done during every home game in the middle of the fourth inning.  Going into this game Teddy was 0-525.  Then, in a heroic effort, with a little help from the Phillies fanatic, Teddy finally won.  There were seriously more cheers when Teddy won than when the Nationals put the first run on the board in the bottom of the same inning.  Oh, by the way, the Nationals won and secured home field advantage throughout the playoffs.

It’s been a great year to be a baseball fan in the DC metro area.  I’ll always be a Rockies/Astros fan first, but I think after all the excitement this year, and a lot more still to come, maybe when my teams are mathematically eliminated on August 1^st, I’ll still have someone to root for....