Church, Puppies and Baseball

That end-of-the-school-year whirlwind is beginning. Our weekend began with Sean's First Communion on Saturday.

This is not Sean's type of event at all, he's not terrible about dressing up but having photos taken is usually about enough to put him over the edge. He did a phenomenal job of cooperating with all the fuss.

A rare moment where I caught him smiling during the service

Many people throw big catered events afterward, but baseball rules our Saturdays and after the service was over our goal was to get the kids out of their ties and into their baseball uniforms.

My parents and two aunts drove down and we ate a hurried lunch at Souplantation so that we wouldn't be late for the game.

Then after all that, the fields were deemed too wet to play on so we went back to our house and brought some of the puppies from next door over to our house.

Our next-door neighbor bred her female yellow lab a few months ago and now they've got seven 6 1/2-week old puppies, six males and one female. We've been visiting them regularly and are getting ready to take one ourselves.

When Steven was 18 months old, we got a puppy, a half-lab, half Australian shepherd named Rudy. We loved that dog, but when we moved to our new house (the one we're living in now), in spring 2001 we were having the landscaping done and we had to keep Rudy inside. He began getting out and one night he got out and got hit by a car.

We were heartbroken, and it was over two years later that I was even able to consider getting another dog. I started looking for another puppy, then we found Steven's brain tumor, and after his treatment his immune system was compromised, and we were traveling a lot, a dog wasn't a responsibility we wanted to take on.

But now it's time I think. We didn't care about getting a dog with pedigree and Doug kept saying that we should find another dog elsewhere, but the kids were in love from the first day with those puppies and now Doug is also.

We're going to get the biggest and the whitest of the bunch. They're calling him Snowball and we're waffling on whether to use that name or to pick another. He'll be coming to live with us in another week or so.

Sunday was the Little League Baseball Bash, a carnival and parade and the day for team photos. Steven and Sean are on the same team, Minor B. This is the first time Steven has played Little League. Another interesting aside is that there's another boy on the team who's survived a brain tumor, the boy at the far left of the back row was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a similar tumor to Steven's, when he was five.

It was also an opportunity to take pictures of the kids in their baseball uniforms not covered in dirt, a side effect of not having their game the day before, although even though they didn't have a game they were still rolling around in the grass and dirt before it was photo time.

But I still want to know who it was that decided that all-white uniforms are an appropriate choice for boys this age? Obviously it wasn't the person doing the laundry.

- Kathleen