stopping to smell the roses, part eleventy hundred

i've done a post or few like this before and there are countless other stories that i should have jotted down as well.

so i made it home from work, picking up one of jake's birthday gifts (from L's parents), and picking up jake from school by around 4:30pm. jake was excited to play some baseball outside, but he said he didn't want to do 'the catching.' what a surprise, he never really liked that last season either. well, he needn't have worried because we couldn't find his glove anyways. the one that was easy to find is the big one that is the next size up.

jake wanted to do 'the hitting' so we got the tee contraption (this wild espn one that will load balls for you but we've never really messed with that feature) outside with the one ball of three that we could find. remind me to have a stern chat with the equipment manager (oh, that's probably me.). after hitting a few dribbling grounders, jake started lacing some hard hits and generally not where i was standing. he tried to tell me where to stand and then would sneakily hit it way away from me. i think he remembered something from last season! indeed, he naturally remembered how to stand with a more open stance so that his hits would go toward third base instead of up the middle or towards first (this standard t-ball strategy gives the kids more time to make it to first. no, i never thought of it before last season either.).

once he tired of that, we had planned to take a walk / jog. i asked if he wanted to ride his elmo bike (though i wondered if he would be too big for it). he certainly did, but whaddya know, we couldn't find it either. turns out we sold it last summer in a garage sale because it had gotten too small. i tell ya what, my old steel trap gets pretty rusty sometimes. anywho, we found a diego tricycle and he had a blast as we made a long lap around the neighborhood. we stayed on the sidewalk and he got a bit frustrated with the people who park their cars (in their own driveway) across the sidewalk. he asked me to 'teach' him how to go around them. i also had him go down the 'ramps' of the driveways and sidewalks, but it took quite a while for him to realize that i was telling him it was ok to go in the road. oftentimes he would only do it if i was holding his hand.

i titled this post 'stopping to smell the roses' because, as he so often does, jake taught me about life. i, as per my norm, had a tight agenda for our afternoon playtime. we had done the baseball thing and i wanted us to go faster on our walk/jog so that i could get some actual exercise. however, as per his norm, jake often would stop and listen to the cows out back or stop to say hello to someone (ok, everyone) or stop and just look at something he found interesting. i found myself - again, as per my norm - telling jake to 'hurry up' and 'come on jake come on'. but then it hit me: if life is constantly filled with 'hurry up' and 'come on' when will we ever get to enjoy wherever it was that we were heading so fast? when will we ever have 'arrived'? goals in life are a good thing, but we can't drive so hard toward them that we forget to enjoy the scenery of life on the way.