Please enjoy this correspondence coming to you live from the Lincoln Elementary School Baseball Fall Ball Fields: proof that youth sports fun needs no hiatus.

Julian is on Joe Miles’ team. His wife is about twelve months pregnant and still looks amazing. By month five of my pregnancies, I had assumed and accepted my role as Chairman of the Ass Expansion Program, convinced that caloric consumption during the last six months didn’t count and that I would walk right out of the hospital wearing clothes not purchased at Pea in the Pod or the Target maternity section.

Sydney was four pounds the day I brought her home. Still surfacing from a Pitocin haze, C-section and nicked bladder, I begged the pediatrician on call that day that I was sure sending me home with a human was not a good idea. I had never even kept a houseplant alive for more than a week. Sending me home with a real live baby was clearly a mistake of foreseeable misfortune. But Dr. Wallace – a forebodingly beautiful black woman with more swagger in her pinky than I’ll ever have in my entire life – flopped Sydney around to show me “it’s virtually impossible to break a baby”. She told me so long as I used Vaseline for diaper rash and only took Sydney to the grocery store on Tuesday mornings when fewest people shop, that I’d be just fine. The Dr. Wallace take-home book would have been the length of a pamphlet, but I’ll be damned if she wasn’t right!

How you feeling? The worse you feel now, the better you’ll feel later, right? The “it’ll feel better when it quits hurting” healthcare motto. Each week does bring you one week closer to healthy. Repeat as necessary.

The latest from Upscale Mayberry:

Rishi – a horribly unathletic Indian kid whose parents keep making him play little league – is on the other team. He prefers the bench to batting, has an adorable Indian accent, plays in his puffy winter coat if it’s less than 60 degrees out and chants over and over and over every time he steps up to plate “I pray for balls. I pray for balls. I pray for balls.”

He is in a bunch of classes with Julian. Super nice kid. Can probably tell you all about the physics of baseball, just doesn’t like to play. His dad is supposedly a really great cricket player which adds an element of familial insult to injury.

Julian is the catcher on the opposing team to Rishi’s. Last time Rishi was up to bat and his personal chanting ensued – “I pray for balls. I pray for balls” as he is holding the bat with waffling elbows like it’s a hundred pound rebar beam, Julian called time out to the ump. He stood up, dusted off the home plate area dirt from his knee pads, leans into Rishi and says “dude, you’ve already GOT balls. What you need is a hit. You got this,” before patting Rishi on the back, pulling his catcher’s mask back over his face and squatting behind the plate. Gotta love the nine year old version of testicular humor based pep talks. Rishi struck out, but at least he swung and walked back to the bench with what may have been a little more swagger.

I love the team little league sponsors. Julian’s team is Dick’s Sporting Goods. Rishi’s team is Midwest Orthodontics. Last week we played the Fun on a Bun travelling frankfurter concession stand food truck team. The last one reminds me of all those attractive nuisance cases we learned about with kids getting run over by the Good Humor ice cream trucks trying to buy rocket pops. In my blue collar home town, everyone knew the most reliable source for recreational drugs was the ice cream man. No one blinked an eye when teenagers went chasing down the street following the ice cream man. I now know the legal term for that: willful ignorance (or gross negligence if the teen gets hit by the lit driver of said truck). Fortunately Fun on a Bun is part of a default permanent structure that seems to have solidified its once mobile self by rusting into the bearings of the pavilion it was last stationed. The guy that runs it is a Rastafarian version of Shaggy and one of my favorite Hampshire peeps.

One week into school and we have already had two days consumed by standardized testing. Even though 66% of our insane property tax base goes to school, they are absolutely doing this subject kids to even more weeks of standardized testing at the expense of actual days of learning to get more funds. Our kids would do better on fewer tests and reap more fiscal district rewards if they spent that time teaching to the kids instead of teaching to tests consuming precious learning hours. It’s like tossing someone in a flight simulator over and over and over again without actual instruction and waiting until you dumb luck get a successful landing that could have been gleaned months prior had someone taken time to teach you about Bernoulli’s principle and how to fly.

I emailed the Academically Talented dean that runs the program Sydney’s in asking for meaningful feedback as to why this year has even more testing than last when last year had more days than ever prior. She sent me a gobbledygook nonresponse about state standards with no application to my query. I feel like the Arlo Guthrie narrator in Alice’s Restaurant, getting every non-answer to my question. I finally get a voicemail from the school Associate Dean of Testing. He is clearly frustrated that his wisdom is being questioned and makes some remark about calls during HIS workhours clearly alluding to him thinking I’m some idiot stay at home mom with nothing but time between pilates class and bowling league. He says “without standardized test results from multiple exams, we cannot confirm the academic rigor needed to undertake more sophisticated classwork subjects like mathematics and poetics.” I bet that guy doesn’t understand new math either.

I (a writing major that took higher level mathematics at the nationally top ranked technical university I attended) have no idea what the hell that means, so I cry uncle with a response email sent in poetic Haiku:

You can try to sell (5) STANZA 1

Me on the pros of these tests (8)

Yet you don’t agree (5)

Real learning is good. (5) STANZA 2

But sometimes school makes no sense; (7)

Thank You Mr. Pence. (5)

I didn’t get a response, although had he sent back a “?” it would have made my day. The literature teacher that I cc:ed (who is sheer talent, down to earth and agrees that testing has gotten out of control) read it. I saw her at curriculum night last week. She said I should get some sort of parent extra credit for Haiku creativity, even though I failed to adequately relate to my audience reader. I said SHE was my audience, to which she replied “well played.”

Game’s over. Home for grilled cheese. Sydney had a few girls over last night for the Taylor Swift album release. Your crew was missed.

Hang in there – xoxox love ya’, Stormy