There's no frostbite in baseball!!

Weather in the middle part of the country is about as predictable as my 3 year old girl. She can warm you with hugs and kisses one minute, and send a shiver through your spine by screaming at you for no apparent reason the next. (some recent things I've been screamed at for were terrible evils like when I tried to put socks on her or when I sang her a good night song . . . guess the singing is pretty horrific.) Anyways, a few days ago at my 5 year old's first ever baseball practice it was approaching 80 degrees - wonderful baseball weather. Then this little thing called a "cold front" moved through. I'm no meteorologist, but I think "Fronts" are another name for Mother Nature's mood swings. Just 3 days later I found myself shivering on the same baseball diamond try to convince my son that it really wasn't that cold once you got moving around. (if by "moving around" you mean walking back to the car where the heater was blasting) His first to-do at practice was to pick up a bat and hit a few balls. Pretty benign, right? Well, these bats are made of aluminum, and the part I haven't shared with you yet was that the wind chill put the temperature at 22 degrees. So in essence, when you picked up a bat, it became part of your hand in a painful way. Like a guy with hypothermia hugging a giant ice cube. He was a trooper though and did his thing . . . but the volume of the muttering increased with each swing. By the time he was done, he was in fact, DONE. As his friends fielded grounders and ran around the bases, Braeden let me know that he wouldn't be doing any more baseball today. It was just too cold he told me every few seconds. I tried in vain for almost 30 minutes to convince him that he could do it, partly because all the other kids were doing their thing. But it was in vain - his mind was made up . . . perhaps frozen in place. Eventually he was telling me through slushy tears that he wanted to just go home. Finally, I let my pride down and told him we could leave. As we drove home I asked my son if he had fun . . . almost rhetorically. I got the exaggerated rolling of the eyes that I deserved.