Batter Up or Battered Up?

The weather has turned nicer and Rachel and I are spending more time playing outside. Sometimes we kick around a soccer ball in the cul de sac. Other times we play baseball.

Rachel has a plastic ball and an adorable little Hello Kitty bat. If I swing the bat hard enough, I can feel it bending. It almost feels as if there is a tube of cardboard inside.

When we first started practicing, Rachel insisted on swinging righthanded. At some point, I persuaded her to try lefthanded, since she writes with her left hand. She seemed to have a more natural swing from that side and lately, she's made solid contact more often.

Of course, being six, you can only swing so long before you get bored. Rachel has taken a liking to standing on her mini-trampoline and using it as home plate. It took me a little while to adjust and throw my underhand pitches a little higher to adapt to her new strike zone.

So we're out there playing the other day and I'm thinking, "What creative idea can I come up with to make this fun?"

Then the answer became clear. Spread around the tree in our front yard were fossilized Dunkin Donuts Munchkins my wife had tossed from her car. She had thrown them out in the grass for the birds. I'm not sure what the birds were supposed to do with them. They had hardened to the point of becoming round doorstops that might be painful to the average beak.

And I'm thinking, "Well,they are round. They are smaller than the baseball and it might be a good test of her eye/hand coordination." So I put down the plastic baseball and started chunkin' Munchkins.

To my amazement, Rachel started making solid contact. Maybe she just sees food better. If so, she comes by it naturally. The Munchkins were so hard, they didn't even fly apart when they were swatted.

I knew enough that I didn't intend to find out how much they hurt if one flew right at me. I could see that a Munchkin flew a long way when the bat hit it just right. As a friend of mine said when I told her about it a day or two later, "Yeah, the Wicked Witch of the West pretty much thought the same thing!"