I come home after dinner with a friend and Aidan is waiting for me. "Bobbi, I want to play baseball" he says. He's been wanting to play baseball a lot lately. I say "ok" and the game is on. Aidan digs out the plastic baseball bat and the small glove I brought him from the US. One problem, no ball. He starts to dig into the toy pile which sits in the corner of our dining room (we live in kind of a small place -- no play rooms for sure). I join the search but neither one of us is having any luck. Aidan asks for the Ayi's to help. He asks in Chinese and I know the word for ball (qui 球) so I know he's asking. Soon we have two ayis and myself looking. Aidan, obviously smarter than me, has moved on once he delegated the task. He is now putting on the glove. He mistakenly puts it on his right hand so I show him it goes on the left. Sure enough one off the Ayis finds the ball and the game starts.

Aidan wants to pitch and have me hit. He throws the ball fairly straight and it is easy enough to tap the ball at him. He bends down like the middle infielder he was born to be and scoops the ball up. Good form and technique for a four year old. The catch with the bare right hand, move to the glove, will be a lesson he learns naturally once the ball starts to hurt. We continue to play for bit, Aidan's pitching gets more and more wild the more he throws and it appears as if the ball just comes in random directions.

Aidan has already leaned is best to start low

All this action is happening in the living room because it is about 25 degrees outside.

I try to get Lydia interested in the game but it doesn't seem to be her cup of tea yet. She does like to run and just the night before we raced in the short space rumored to be our living room. The funny thing is when I let her win (don't think for a second I will admit defeat), she mimicked what the Wii game does. In Wii, when you when the character representing you stands tall, extents arms, and in general is happy as heck. The loser, on the other hand, assumes a humped posture, looks down, and in general looks depressed. In additional to playing the "Wii winner" herself Lydia expects me to play the part of he "Wii loser". Yes, this is how fall I've fallen.

We turn on the Wii and Aidan and I play Wii baseball. Then we switch to Wii Boxing which requires you to simulate punching. It is actually quite a good workout. I let Lydia try it and she is just adorable. Her small arms jutting out punching and then she knocks out the opponent. This makes her happy. But she gets tired and I need to encourage her with chants of jiayou (加油). Eventually she wins the match.

Lydia lining up a putt.

Later that night Aidan's fever kicked in and reached 104 and he got quite fussy. Yang debated taking him to emergency but we let Tylenol do it's magic -- even though Aidan spit out half of it. But it kicked in or something did and he only had a low fever fine by morning.

We left Aidan at home for the day and just took Lydia to school. He was quite mad at Yang for not staying with him all day. He doesn't quite understand the job concept. As I left he said, "Bobbi, we play based ball tonight".