Really, when I look at my life, I've got one thing that's not going so well: my business. I've got one thing that's going spectacularly beyond my most unreasonable hopes: my son.
Really, I would much rather have it that way than the other way around. My son, Logan, is my pride and joy. If you have a child, you really understand, at a fundamental level, what "pride and joy" means.
Logan has been a very active child his entire life. He was born to manipulate the propulsion of spherical objects through three dimensional space from time he could toddle.
Baseball, so far, has been the first competitive sport where he showed aptitude. However, he's been working hard on basketball lately, and I think his chances of making the Junior Cats next year are pretty good. He's always been a kid where a little goes a long way. You show him what he needs to do, and then, your job as a parent, is to keep him from working himself down to a nub.
I'll try to get him a practice session or two a week. When the weather improves, we'll go down to the playground so he can shoot around. Sometime in early Summer, the schools have open gym on Sunday evenings for basketball players. He really needs to do that if he plans on playing Cats next year.
Football is all he can think about, though. He's never played a down of football in pads, but he is ready to go. The football program here starts for 5th graders. They begin with 4 days a week of conditioning. I'm pretty excited about it. I think he'll do well. He's always been one of the naturally fastest kids in his age group.
In the mean time, his baseball workouts have gone very well. He's making a good case for himself to get some innings as a pitcher. He hits better now than he did last year, but then, everybody has improved. Though, this year, it's pretty obvious that you can't take for granted that the kids will be as good, relatively, as they were last year.
Some of the kids in the middle have closed the gap with some of the kids at the top. Logan's best friend on the team, Sam, basically went into an off-season baseball program and it is paying huge dividends this year. I've honestly seen very few people of any age work as hard in the offseason as Sam did. I absolutely have never seen a 9/10 year old do it. The kid lives and breathes baseball.
So, I'm just eager to see how it goes this year. Logan's stroke at the plate is pretty impressive. There are a couple of fields we play on where Logan could go yard. He was among the team's leaders last year in power numbers. I think he may have led the team in triples. He also had two hits that were among the very hardest that anybody on the team hit.
His coaches have also noticed that he's amped up his performance a bit. Last year, he really flew under the radar in pre-season workouts. This year, I think the coaches are a bit more sold on him and they have bigger expectations for him. That will probably mean giving him a few more opportunities to shine. For instance, last year, he started the season batting either 10th or somewhere near it, out of 11 kids. By the end of the season, he led in a couple of offensive categories, and because of his speed, got put up to leadoff hitter.
They really didn't have a position for him to play, and he bounced around here and there getting a fair rotation, but by the end of the season, he has solidly established himself as the team's starting centerfielder. If we'd named a league all-star team, I would have put his chances at being an all-league selection at CF as being pretty high.
All this speculation, though, is just that. Last year, Logan was pretty average in practice, but turned it up a notch at gametime. Other players went the other direction. If Logan manages to turn it up a notch at gametime this year, he'll be a force to be reckoned with.
He's just the best little kid and I feel blessed to be able to be his Dad. Even if the rest of the world were to crash around my feet, if I can just help Logan along the path he's naturally drawn to, my life would be complete.
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