An athlete, a gardener, a crawler

This one's for you, Mytito

My brother was my first soccer coach.  He was a senior in high school.  I was in third grade.   It drove him nuts that I was on his team, and so I spent, I kid you not, at least 50% of every practice running laps as punishment.  Ultimately, my brother went on to a career as a soccer coach.  I did not go on to a career as a goalie or midfielder (I did, however, go on to become a high school soccer coach).  Anyway, my brother is now a coach at the University of South Carolina and he has plans for our boy.   And they involve soccer camp, shin guards, and hackey sacks.  So, if Mytito’s got plans for you (if you read Hijas, you know the whole Mytito story. If you didn’t, the Cliff Notes version is that my brother was called Tito growing up and so are a lot of other little Latino boys. So, in places like Puerto Rico where Titos are a dime a dozen, a girl’s gotta come up with a way to distinguish her brother from the other Titos.  And this girl did that by stating the obvious.  “My Tito!”), he’s also got the outfit for you.  And baby boy sported that outfit today.  You know what they say.  If you want the job, you gotta wear the uniform.       

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were planting a garden in honor of baby’s biological parents.  After BF built the garden boxes, we went out and bought our favorite veggies: squash, zucchinni, cucumbers, okra, eggplant, and peppers.  And then we waited for two weeks because the sky was wide open.  I wasn’t sure if our little peatpots of starter veggies would make it through the deluge, but they did.  So finally, this past weekend, with the help of Honey and Papa, our wonderful next door neighbors, we planted the veggies behind our garage.  So far they are thriving and we have other big plans for this family garden spot.  Our hope is to make this little nook in our yard a bit of a secret garden complete with the perfect places for reading, thinking, resting, and nesting and to teach baby how to nurture life.  I’ll share photos as we add to it. 

Baby’s first crawl was a beeline to the fireplace.  Nice, eh?  And especially interesting to us because we spend very little time in our living room and because we do nothing with our fireplace.  How’d he even know it was there?  But he did, and he husseled to it.  Fortunately, I cut him off at the pass and though we don’t use the fireplace (our chimney is over 80 years old), there are fake logs in there that will soon be removed so all that’s left is an empty space.  Our fireplace is on the wall connecting the living room to the dining room and it’s open on both sides.  Once the logs are gone, baby can use the fireplace as his batcave and go from living room to dining room and back in a jiffy.  Nice deal for a kid, I think.