grass stains: Sunday afternoon at our home away from home

Sunday was chock-full of places to be. Nathaniel and Nicholas each had baseball clinics, and Nathaniel and Grayson had a Cub Scout community event, too. We needed to divide and conquer to get everyone where they needed to be, so Grayson took Nathaniel to his clinic and then onto the Scout event, and Jakey and I escorted Nicholas to his clinic.

Once out on the field, Nick looked, um, JUST LIKE a ballplayer.

When he wasn't busy adjusting himself, he busied himself NOT looking just like a ballplayer. He sort of looked like a 5-year-old who was fascinated with dirt. SO MUCH DIRT.

Eventually he was able to bring himself back to the task at hand.

And luckily for all of us, it was a gorgeous day for ball.

The clinic had the boys rotating through seven stations for 12 minutes each. While Nick was busy rotating, Jakey and I rotated ourselves right over to the playground.

Jakey's a big fan of the playground at the ballpark.

It's intended for kids slightly older than Jake, but that's never stopped him.

After all, he's 2 going on 12.

Every once in a while we'd go track Nick down on whatever field he was on, and it always looked like he was having the time of his life.

So once we'd reassured ourselves that he was doing OK without us, we'd head back to the playground.

It was a beautiful -- albeit HOT -- day, so after about an hour we took a snack and drink break.

Smarties ... the snack of champions.

Nick's final station was a batting station, so we loaded up our things and went to watch him there. He connected with the ball repeatedly.

He thought it was really weird that they played with a "baby ball," as he called it, since they use real aluminum bats and regulation baseballs, typically. But that didn't stop him from running the bases like it counted.