Lea Time

Because Hallie gets a lot of itinerant services (occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech therapy) and is in a social skills inclusion group that meets at the girls' (wonderful) preschool three times a week, Lea and Hallie are on slightly different school schedules.   Both kids at school for stay full days (until 5:30pm) on Mondays but I pick up Lea at 3pm on Fridays and Hallie remains at school for another two and a half hours.  While this complicates matters for me (I feel like I am circling back and forth to the YCCA endlessly on Friday afternoons), this somewhat odd childcare arrangement has afforded me some very good opportunities for one on one time with Lea.  As a second kid and as a younger sibling of a somewhat complicated older sister (who consequently gets dragged to therapy sessions and spends an awful lot of time hanging around in waiting rooms), I think it's awesome that the two of us get some quality time together.

Often, when I show up to pick up Lea at 3:00pm, I find her like this:

 

I find this ironic since she almost never goes down for a nap for me (at least not easily while we are at home and Hallie is here with us).  The best I can hope for is that she conks out in the stroller when we are headed to or from some activity; otherwise, she fights to stay awake since she might miss something important.  In contrast, at school, she goes down easily for her teachers, Miss Janet and Miss Rachael.

After Lea awakens (or I coax her gently from sleep), she's ready to go.  First we excavate her lunchbox in search of snacks.  On the off chance that she has finished everything (and that everything usually amounts to quite a spread that includes a couple of chicken nuggets or chicken salad; some peas or edamame; fresh fruit; something crunchy like yogurt covered pretzels or Barbara's vanilla animal crackers or 'fishies'-- Pepperidge Farm goldfish -- and yogurt, I carry spare crackers or pretzels with me for an impromptu additional snack.  In decent weather, Lea would request a visit to the playground across from school.  Here's a picture of Lea swinging in her favorite swing.

Whilst swinging, she'll point to the "castle", by which she means Sparks Shot Tower, which was America's first shot tower, constructed in 1808 by plumber Thomas Sparks and his partner John Bishop.  It's 142 feet high.  The reason it's so tall is that, before mechanization, the only way to construct perfectly round musket balls, or shots, was to pour molten lead from really high places.  Bishop was a Quaker.  Manufacturing gun shot was an uneasy job for someone whose religion avows non-violence and so he quit the business when it began to supply musket balls for the War of 1812 (before that the shot was used in hunting).  The last great musket battles were fought in the US Civil War, and Shot Tower produced war materiel for the Union Army engaged in that conflict.  Anyway, long after its product became obsolete, the site was slated for adapted reuse and is now part of the Philly Rec Department. 

I think Lea is quite correct in assuming that it looks like a castle:

It's gotten a bit too nippy for regular playground visits (I literally got Lea stuck in one of those swings when I bundled her, and her snowsuit, into one on a particularly blustery day a couple of weeks ago.  I literally had to turn the swing on its side and shove her out of it that way, which was somewhat harrowing since she's gotten pretty big).  So we've taken to visiting the nearby dog run where she can watch the dogs play from the comfort of her stroller (snowsuits and blankets and all).  The neighborhood dog owners get a kick out of Lea who engages the dogs in full length, complicated conversations; squeals with joy; and begs for 'hand kisses' from the pooches.

After a playground visit and/or a dog run, Lea will often ask if we can repair to the local cafe.  She hangs out and has a snack with me like a big girl:

She often rejects her own sippy cup or even a box of Horizon organic chocolate milk in favor of my drink (in this case a sugar-free vanilla Italian soda).

After our snack, we're usually ready to pick up Hallie.  While Lea loves spending time with me, she is always ready to get her big sister.  She adores Hallie and worships the ground upon which she walks (and wants to do everything that Hallie does, which sometimes brings the two of them into a bit of conflict since Hallie, as a typical older sister, wants to call the shots and set limits for Lea).  So she's always thrilled to go back up to the school and get her sister.  But I like to think that Lea enjoys our quality time, too.  I know that, down the road, she might not be so satisfied with spending time with me when Hallie gets to play with therapists and ride horses and have extra classes.  And I certainly hope that we can make it up to Lea by getting her special classes and doing things that satisfy her interests.  But I must say that I love this Lea time and it's some of my best spent time all week.

Cousins!

This is a seriously belated post, but I am going to try to catch up with the posts that I meant to compose and publish.  I guess we were too busy trying to catch up with life to tend to our real one over the past few months...

Here are some very cute shots of Hallie and Lea from a November weekend that they spent hanging out with their 'little' cousins Hannah and Adam. 

In these two, the kids are all lined up and walking hand-in-hand in the drive outside of Grammy's condo:

Here they are the sole audience members at a children's puppet show in Atlantic City.  While it was sad that they were the only ones who came to the show, Hallie got the opportunity to get in some face-to-face personal time with one of the puppets.

 And here they are, lined up and walking along the walk in AC.

And racing along one of the AC piers:

And here's a close up of the girls doing the same thing:

 Alas, Sharon did not get any good shots of the kids from their slumber party or the AC Aquarium, but suffice it to say that the kids really enjoyed themselves no matter what they were doing and no matter how badly the photos that the grownups took turned out!

Stay tuned for more updates as I try to continue to catch up on the posts I failed to compose over the past six weeks!

Lea the Ham

Lea gives us this look (which is a sort of a cross between a smile and a smirk) about two hundred times a day.  She'll do something cute (or naughty), see if we are watching, then meet our eyes and smirk, and do it again, and again, and again.

Lea can definitely be a handful, but boy is she cute!

Clearly, next year we need to find a ham costume for this kid!  (Thanks, Nadia, for the great idea).

Halloween Pictures

This year, Hallie is all about holidays.  She's aware of the structure of the calendar for the first time (they are studying the days of the week, the months of the year, the seasons, and their respective holidays in her pre-K class at preschool this year and Hallie appears to be following along with the lessons quite nicely).  Hallie loves costumes almost as much as she loves chocolate (plain, nothing mixed into it, please!), so Halloween, the first real holiday of the fall term, is naturally quite attractive to her.  And I cannot help but think that somehow she knows that this was the first holiday that she spent with us at home after being sprung from the NICU on October 10th.

Four years ago, Hallie went as a baby dragon:

 

We chose this costume because Hallie sounded an awful lot like a dragon when she made noise (which was not terribly often, truth be told.  Little did we know that this was one very good indication that her vocal cord was paralyzed).  Not to mention the fact that the costume, which was essentially a little green and purple robe into which we bundled Hallie, was easily compatible with the tubing that went with Hallie's oxygen canister. 

Needless to say, Hallie did not trick-or-treat at all that first year.  She hung out and napped in her stroller while I distributed candy to other kids.  That was activity enough for our not-quite-one-month-adjusted micropreemie who weighed in at about seven pounds, soaking wet.

Four years later, Hallie still loves dragons.  But she didn't want to be one for Halloween.  Instead, like a lot of girls her age, her choice was Tinkerbell.   Hallie had been looking forward to this event for weeks and somehow we managed to keep her dress clean (there was a last minute run in with some chocolate ice cream that fortunately ended well) and her light-up wings from getting bent out of shape.  

Here are a couple of shots of her at the annual school Halloween parade (which, sadly, I had to miss this year since I was teaching on the freakishly warm--with highs in the mid to upper 70s--Thursday afternoon on which it was held):

 

 

Here's a shot of Hallie with some of her school mates:

It was a bit harder to figure out what Lea wanted to be for Halloween.  At least in part this was related to the fact that Lea does not really enjoy donning costumes.  She grooves on trying on other people's shoes and she can get into wearing hats.  She's even eager to dress herself in whatever laundry (clean or dirty) might be awaiting transport down to the washer or up to the bedroom for folding and stashing away.  But costumes are not her thing. 

We did buy her two, and she did end up wearing both.  The first--a fairy butterfly outfit--was more suited to warm conditions, but did not make Lea very happy at all.  This was the best shot of her that we got:

Much more representative of Lea's response to the entire event are these pictures:

Lea was no more thrilled to wear the second costume which we bought her, which was more appropriate to the very cold weather that we had on Halloween proper.

Here's Lea not enjoying being the Cat in the Hat:

Hallie, in contrast, really enjoyed posing with her cousins, Red Devil Hannah and Adam ("Anakin") Skywalker in advance of heading out to collect candy:




Lea perked up a bit when she realized that we'd be heading to the development down the road from where the cousins live in Lea's trusty Radio Flyer wagon:

She also became markedly more enthusiastic when she realized that trick-or-treating involved being given vast quantities of chocolate, of which she is very fond.

Here's a picture of Lea in cousin Sarah's arms.  We are pretty certain that she got extra loot for being so cute:

 

By the end of the evening though, it had gotten seriously cold, and Hallie was shivering in spite of the fact that she was wearing leggings on top of tights and a long sleeve shirt underneath her costume.  She took refuge under the blanket that we had brought with us (on the urging of Aunt Laura, who was smart enough to realize to know how cold it was going to get once the sun went down) and all you could see of her were her light up wings:

The kids were completely tuckered out on the drive home (though they each demanded and ate a bit of their chocolate).   And they're still eating their way through their stash (and will be for a while).

Well, at least it's still not quite Thanksgiving, so perhaps I can be forgiven for posting these pics so belatedly!

Lea-isms

(This post was begun on October 27th and not finished until November 10th.  I think that this says a lot about our lives right now!)

There are so many cute things that Lea says and does, and we don't want to forget any of them.  (What we do want to forget is the fact that she slept not at all last night, and instead kept popping her eyes open, calling out for one or another of us, and wreaked havoc with our already-fragile circadian rhythms.  But that is a [sob] story for some other time).

Anyway, Lea has been super cute lately.  Her vocabulary is phenomenal and she is speaking in complex sentences [most of them four to six words in length; she also follows multi-part directions really well.  At least when she wants to ;-)].

She is a huge tease.  When I come in to wake up Hallie in the morning, I often use Lea as my alarm clock.  I'll say to Lea, "Lea, tickle Hallie!"  And Lea will sidle over to Hallie (or leap frog over Sharon to get to Hallie) and start ticking her and will say "tickle tickle."  She'll do the same thing to Sharon and Zen (who, being a cat, is mostly perplexed by this creature that used to be his size and now can take him down in a wrestling match).

But Lea enjoys being teased as much as she loves teasing. Her latest shtick is to encourage me to smooch or tickle her. She'll offer me her neck and exclaim "moochie on the NE--CK". The second I start smooching her, she'll giggle and yell:  "Hey, stop it!"  If I stop bugging her, she'll present her neck or belly to me, and ask for tickling, and then once more yell "Hey, stop it!"  And if, ultimately, I comply with her request and cease and desist once and for all, she will start tickling herself and yell, "Hey, stop it!"  She is a very odd creature.

I don't have a picture of Lea smooching us, but I do have one of her smooching the Mama Bear at Three Bears Park, which is often where I take her after school on Fridays:

The other thing she's doing these days is letting us know that she's pooped by saying (logically enough): "I POOPED". She'll then lay herself down on her changing pad, sometimes after grabbing a diaper, and present herself for a change.

Once I open up her diaper, she'll look up at me and say, "P-U, I stink!" I asked one of her teachers, Miss R., whether she ever does this at school, but she never does. So I guess it's a cuteness she reserves for us.

Speaking of school, Sharon just met with Miss R. for parent/teacher conferences. Apparently, Lea is the most verbal kid in her class and is someone who is trying to get all the other kids to talk (with some success). She's consistently using two -to-three word sentences and her goal for the next few months is to begin using three-to-four word ones. [To put this into some perspective: this was Hallie's goal last year (when she was three turning four). So it startled us a bit that this would be a goal for a kid who was not yet two.]

Lea also initiates play with her peers and adults and is more social than her mates. That's another way in which she is decidedly un-Hallie like.

But our two girls are very similar in a lot of important ways:

•Both love music and both know the words to more songs that I can believe. Both like to sing and hum all day long and are very enamored of learning the proper choreography/hand motions to the songs that they sing.

•Both are really into letters and numbers and were early alphabet-reciters and counters. We have no idea whether Lea can recognize letters yet (Hallie could at 20 months corrected) and we don't really care. We know that they both love words and books and that this will translate on its own into loving reading (this is something that Hallie already is working on).

•Both of the girls are really into art these days.  Lea has taken the lead on this one:  she's always loved coloring with crayons and markers (and happily doesn't mind if these markers are the Color Wonder variety).  But lately Hallie is into real coloring, too.  I suspect that she is finding it easier to hold her crayons and markers and not nearly as painful to draw as it used to be.

Lea does have a bit of a disadvantage in terms of height, though.  This has not stopped her.  She devised a workaround:

Lea figured out that, if you move the puzzle cube out just a bit, you can create the most delightful step stool.  And if you get bored with your artwork, you can always dump those puzzle pieces all over the floor.

•Both kids are into jumping, a lot.  Lea has long been a bit jealous of Hallie because her older sister can actually clear the floor.  So Lea has been working on skill-building.  She can now clear the floor and jump in place a bit.  But that's not good enough for her; it's much more fun to jump off of something.  Here she's working on jumping off of the aforementioned Three Bear statue:

•Both are chronically cute. Incurably so, really.

To prove the point, I promise to (eventually) upload some Hallowe'en pictures to the blog and to do so before Thanksgiving!

Let them eat...bread?

Hallie, Lea and I were wandering through Wholefoods, also known as the snack emporium, the other day.  As she typically does, Hallie requested some bread.  I reached over to get a packet of sliced whole wheat sandwich bread (which is one of Hallie's staples) but Hallie expressed her preference for a "long one."  I figured that she'd break off a piece and nibble on it while we did our shopping.

Apparently Hallie preferred the corn on the cob treatment...

Expressing Feelings

Last week, Hallie came down with her first cold of the season--you know, the kind you pick up from hanging out with a million other kids at preschool who are leaking snot (and a few who apparently have contracted pertussis).  Sharon and I were crossing our fingers (and leaving little white marks and dents in our hands) that this seemingly run of the mill cold (which affected all of us, but Hallie worse than the rest) would not morph into pneumonia, as all of Hallie's colds have for the past year.  We were religious about keeping up with Hallie's breathing treatments (Hallie actually started to request her 'puffers' whenever she was having problems breathing), monitored Hallie's temperature very carefully, counted her respiratory rate on a regular basis, and made sure to take heed of any sign that Hallie was in pain. (We are still kicking ourselves for not having paid attention to Hallie's complaints last December/January that her back was hurting since we might have been able to avoid hospitalization for that first very bad pneumonia had we only realized her lungs were inflamed a little earlier than we did).

Anyway, we were a bit on edge, but everyone pulled through and her cold is apparently getting better right on schedule (that is, 7 to 10 days after she first exhibited symptoms of it).  So, between our vigilance and a booster shot against pneumonia, we're out the other end of this thing.

Of course, no cold around here is complete unless it is accompanied by some vomiting.  Vomiting has turned into a quite rare event for Hallie (I think we can still count the number of times she's upchucked this year on 3 hands, but honestly one indication that she's not vomiting anymore is that I'm not counting the times she does anymore, either).  Since we don't really expect Hallie to hurl, we're a bit out of practice when she does.  This became a bit of a problem last Saturday when I went to lie down next to Hallie because I did not like the way she was coughing (horrible deep coughs in her sleep with an alarming rate of frequency).  Not long after I decided that I needed to be closer to her, she had an uncontrollable coughing fit and one thing led to another.   I quickly found myself trying to locate the bucket that still resides under the bed in the hopes of catching the inevitable return of dinner but was just a moment too late.

So we found ourselves lifting a soiled and upset half asleep little girl out of bed; stripping off her shirt; changing out the sheets, pillowcases, and comforter cover; and removing her beloved green fleece froggy blanket.  I quickly threw everything in the wash and we got new linens on the bed and Hallie back in it within a few minutes. 

Hallie slept in on Sunday and was not quite herself.  She seemed a bit sullen and subdued, but who wouldn't be given that she was nursing a cold and had had her sleep interrupted?  Sharon decided to download a few movies for Hallie from Netflix and we sat around watching them with her.

One of the movies Hallie chose was The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, which is one of our friend Taylor's favorite flicks.  Hallie hasn't really watched Sesame Street in over a year now, but she and Lea (who doesn't really watch Sesame Street at all, but who somehow knew how to identify Elmo from the moment she was born) like Elmo a lot.  Hallie has long known the songs featured in this film since we have a DVD of them (and used to use that DVD as an incentive to get her to eat), so we figured this would be a good choice of films that would appeal to both of our kids. 

The plot line of the film involves Elmo losing his blanket in Oscar's trash can (after refusing to share it with his best monster buddy, Zoe), and then having an evil villain (nicely played by Mandy Patinkin) snatch the blanket and refuse to give it back.  Elmo valiantly tries to retrieve his blankie and faces down creatures like a giant chicken (clearly Big Bird's evil alter ego) who attempt to eat him and (spoiler alert) finally prevails and all is set right when Elmo learns to share.  In other words, the plot had an easy story line with a good moral lesson to it, and a whole bunch of song-and-dance routines and some scary bits mixed in to keep the whole thing suspenseful.

Now, it's never clear to us what or how much narrative plot line Hallie comprehends.  Hallie is very, very bright and knows thousands of words and concepts; loves to analogize; and is extremely curious about the things that surround her in the universe.  She always wants to know what things are called and she likes to categorize stuff (shapes, animals, machines, colors, etc).  She wants to know the names of people and not just of stuff (watching baseball with her is a bit of a challenge because I cannot always identify the players for those annoying teams that don't have last names emblazoned on the back of their jerseys...yes, New York Yankees, I am talking to you!).  And once you tell her the name of an object, animate or inanimate, she will know it forever and ask you to quiz her on it (every time Jayson Werth comes up to the plate, Hallie turns to me and asks "what's his name?" and then I'll respond with "what's his name, Hallie?" and she'll retort:  "That's Jayson!")

But despite this quirky knowledge base and her curiosity about the universe, Hallie still has trouble following along with the narrative development of a story.  Even though we're constantly acting out the three little pigs, Hallie hasn't mastered the lesson that pigs should take care to build houses well (and not out of straw and sticks because they want to play) if they are to stave off the advances of wolves with good lung capacity.  The big bad wolf is neither big nor bad in our world:  he plays with the pigs and he romps with Little Red and appears to have forgotten entirely about his mission to make a tasty dinner of bacon with a side of granny. 

On the one hand, it's comforting to think that Hallie's universe is not complicated by questions as to why so many children's tales are so ominous and foreboding (if you want an answer, read the fabulous essay on Mother Goose tales by French cultural historian Robert Darnton in this book).  Nevertheless, it is simultaneously also somewhat disturbing to us that, on some fundamental level, the complexities of human emotions and social relationships in all of their complexity (even when rendered by monsters and animals) seem to elude Hallie.  We don't know what she thinks or feels about these things because she doesn't really tell us.  She has learned to look for clues about sadness (overt crying) or happiness (smiling and laughing) and can respond accordingly -- sometimes this is spontaneous (she'll notice Lea is crying and offer her a band-aid or even a hug) and sometimes prompted (she won't notice the crying and has to be cued to look at Lea, see what she's doing, and try to figure out why she is doing it).  But she never asks why Lea is crying (even when something Hallie has done has made Lea cry) or whether Lea wants a hug or a band-aid.  She just accepts it for what it is, responds in a fairly narrowly scripted way, and moves on.  Likewise, even when Hallie is clearly upset about something or feeling ill, if we ask her, "Hallie, how do you feel?" she will respond on the vast majority of occasions with "I feel happy!"  She clearly is not happy, but she expects that this is the right response and gives it to us as a result.  It's hard (read:  impossible) to manage to figure out how to teach a child about causality and consequences (which are higher order thought processes) under this set of circumstances.  The whys and the becauses elude Hallie (which is why we have only heard Hallie ask why exactly once in her life).

All of this brings me back to Elmo and the tale of his stolen blankie.   When Hallie watched the film, she got visibly upset and began to cry.   At first we weren't sure why.  But then Hallie told us why:  in somewhat labored (it involved some stammering) but completely spontaneous language, she told us that Elmo felt sad because her blankie was gone.  At first we were confused.  Hallie has pretty atypically typical pronoun confusion (the genders elude her entirely and most of the time her choice of pronouns seems to be guided by uneducated guesses), so we thought she was somehow confusing 'he' and 'she' and assigning the wrong pronoun to Elmo.  But she wasn't.  A few minutes later she clarified the situation for us:  she was upset because Elmo lost his blankie, and she empathized with Elmo because she had also lost her blankie (I played the villain who snatched it in real life) and she wanted them both to get their blankets back. 

Alas, Hallie's needed a second cycle in the dryer, so the little red monster got his back first, but I made sure that I did everything I could to return Hallie's to her as quickly as possible.

We're never sure around here whether this is indicative of an imminent breakthrough in terms of Hallie's comprehension, capacity for empathy, and social skills or whether this is one of those one-off events (like the sole why we heard eight months ago).  But it is heartening to know that she is beginning to make connections around feelings, and not just categorizing stuff. 

Hallie-isms

Hallie is extremely fond of a good metaphor.  Here are just two recent examples:  Papers fluttering in the breeze "look just like leaves on the tree."  The argyles on her socks this morning "look like diamonds; they are just like the kites flying in the sky."  So I suppose that we should not have been surprised when she came out with the following the other night:

Hallie and Sharon were in the bathroom for pre-bedtime hanging out on the potty.  Hallie let out a very loud fart and exclaimed, concerning the constipation that apparently was the underlying cause of this:  "Mommy, there's a traffic jam in my tushie!"  We found this hilarious and quite clever.  And also promise to delete this post from our blog before it can become a source of embarrassment to our poor kiddo. 

***

On an unrelated matter, Hallie apparently has apparently embraced the roles that Sharon and I have carved out for ourselves (by design or by necessity).  The other morning, Hallie was talking about an upcoming visit with friends and family (loosely based on a melding of a real impending outing with an imagined one fashioned after an episode of Mickey Mouse's Clubhouse).  She was describing how she'd be taking a choo-choo train and said, "I'll sit next to Hannah and Adam and right near my friends Eliza and Taylor.  Mommy will be in the diamond car."  I innocently inquired:  "where is Mama going to sit, Hallie."  Hallie pointed to me and stated, emphatically:  "You're staying here Mama.  You'll be in the kitchen, cooking."   I guess she notices that I do all the cooking around here, no?  Given Hallie's relationship to food, however, I am not sure whether this is a compliment or an insult.

***

The outing that we went on, to a local farm/orchard/pumpkin patch, was organized by our friend Anne, mom to the one and only Eliza Grace.

The farm hosted a small array of barnyard animals, a wagon ride around the stable, some toy tractors and John Deere trikes that the kids could toodle around on in the yard, pumpkins to pick and to decorate, and pony rides.  Our kids loved the animals the most and Lea was thrilled to have a chance to ride the horsies.  They also got into painting their pumpkins and listening and dancing to the band.

Halloween has long been one of Hallie's favorite holidays.  I'm not sure if it's the dress-up aspect (she loves clothing adorned with witches, and pumpkins, and ghosts, etc, as well as full-on costumes), the controlled spookiness of it all (Hallie has been talking about goblins and other scary creatures of late), or just the chocolate (the kid does love her chocolate, but only the plain stuff).   Or maybe it's the fact that she came home from the hospital ten days before Halloween and this is the first holiday of the year that she spent with us?  Who knows.  Whatever it is, it's great fun to see her so happy.  And since Hallie's happiness is infectious, we all end up smiling a lot this time of year, too.

Hallie astride the biggest pony at the farm:

Hallie and Lea dancing around and being silly.

Lea taking her turn on the pony.

Me giving Eliza Grace a ride.

 She also rode a pony and looked good doing it.

And of course the kids had fun clamoring on a miniature John Deere tractor.

A great time was had by all.  Unfortunately, Hallie did develop the sniffles by late in the afternoon.  In retrospect, she appears to have been developing a cold all week (hopefully not a result of the flumist.  Now that she had her bout of pneumonias, I do think it's time to return to the conventional flu shot instead).  But she began to seem run down by late in the day yesterday and has gotten worse throughout the day today.  By tonight she was running a fever of close to 101 degrees.  We're hoping that preemptive flovent and albuterol will keep the junk out of her lungs.  Please cross your fingers on this one since we really cannot (or at least do not wish to) return to the cycle of pneumonias that plagued our kiddo for the better part of last winter and spring.

Doctor No or the Hunt for the RedOctober

These sound like Cold War era movie titles, but they're not. Indeed, unless you believe the Soviet era propaganda that claimed that the Russians invented baseball, or are a historian of the Red Scare in the US and know that the Cincinnati Reds briefly renamed themselves the Cincinnati Red Legs during the McCarthy Era so as to be avoid being mistaken for Bolsheviks (and consequently hauled in to testify en masse before the House UnAmerican Committee), there is really little in the way of a connection between my professional life as a Russian historian and my hobby as a baseball, and more specifically, Phillies enthusiast. Which brings me to the real subject at hand:

On a complete whim and in an uncharacteristic act of spontaneity, Sharon and I decided to go to the first game of the NLDS in which our beloved "Baseball Phillies" (as Hallie likes to call them) were playing the Cincinnati Reds.  I had entered a lottery for a chance to win the right to purchase tickets for the post-season and sadly had not been chosen the first time around.  But the second time is the charm; at 3pm on Tuesday I had a five-hour window of opportunity to snatch up a couple of tickets to the big game, which was to be Roy Halladay's debut in the post-season.  A few well-placed babysitting calls later and the deal was sealed.

Boy was that a great idea.  As a historian, I really appreciate the fact that we got to witness a fabulous part of baseball history:  Halladay pitched only the second ever no-hitter in the post-season and the first one since Don Larsen pitched a no-hitter for the Yankees in their victory against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 8, 1956 in one of their many "Subway Series" that decade.

No doubt my dad had money on that game; my dad lived in Brooklyn --which is where I am from, too--and was one of the few stalwart Yankees fans in that borough.  He bet on the Series against his friend Henry during the formidable run that the two teams had against one another -- the two teams met up seven times during the period that spanned 1941 and 1956.  The Dodgers lost all but one of those contests--the one held in 1955, which was also the only one in which my dad, taking pity on poor Henry, opted to put his money on the Dodgers. When the Dodgers managed to pull off a hard-earned win in game 7, Henry responded by tossing my dad's radio out the window.  No passersby were wounded and I can only assume that my dad spent his earnings on a replacement for it.

Anyway, I digress.   Sharon and I managed to get out to the stadium and to our seats just before the first pitch of the game, which was one of many strikes (79 to be exact, of a total of 104 pitches).  The seats themselves, which were located along the third base line, were none too shoddy; at first I was covetous of those sitting closer down toward the field but that was before the rain started and I realized that we were protected by an overhang.  The two of us settled in to watch the game and Sharon kept poking me every now and then and uttering something along the lines of, "how is the inning over already?  The Reds just came up to the plate!  Did he really get all three out already?"  This happened at least three times before the sixth inning.

By the sixth inning, a sacred hush befell the crowd (well, as much as a hush as can really exist when over 46,000 people are screaming things like "Go Doc!" "Go Phillies!"  and hurling various invectives at the Reds players who came up to the plate).   The previous inning, Halladay had walked the one and only Reds batter who made it on base last night and so there was to be no reprise of his May 29, 2010 perfect game against the Florida Marlins.  But Halladay was painting the corners of the plate so well and working so effectively that all of us there last night knew that he really had a chance to make some history at the Bank.  We held our breath in the eighth, and still no hits.

And then came the ninth:  Ramon Hernandez was the first batman up and he popped out to Chase Utley at second.  Then Miguel Cairo hit a foul caught by Wilson Valdez, who was filling in for our regular third baseman Placido Polanco, who was out with a sore back.  Valdez has been a surprisingly proficient journeyman; the Phils picked him up in the off-season and he's made a real contribution to the team this year playing at shortstop, second- and third-base during what has turned out to be an epic year for injuries.  He really should be considered for team MVP or some other sort of award (never mind his penchant to hit into many, many double plays).

Just one more out was all that Halladay needed.  And catcher Carlos Ruiz, who is amazing and only getting better every day, was going to make sure that he did everything he could to close this game out for Doc.  Reds hitter Brandon Phillips tapped a ball back to the plate, shattering his bat in the process.  Pieces of bat were flying (this was not, of course, visible from our seats, alas, but I saw the whole thing on replay), and between that and the moving ball, there were plenty of obstacles.  Phillips is a fast runner, and Chooch pounced on the ball, smothered it, but did not have time to get into a stable position to make his throw.  So he threw from his knees, which is always a dangerous thing to do.  He didn't want to overthrow first base and create a potential for Phillips to get extra bases.  But he also did not want to be responsible for blowing Halladay's chance at making history.  And so he tossed it over to Ryan Howard, who made the final out, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I don't think a single person left Citizen's Bank Park early last night.   The fans erupted in cheers, the park erupted in fireworks, and the Phillies jumped all over one another like extremely well paid, grown up bear cubs.

As always, Halladay was quietly professional and gave a ton of credit to Chooch.  And Charlie Manuel, the manager, was funny (at least insofar as I could understand him) in his post game interview when he noted to reporters that a lot of the credit should go to the good managing that the Phillies have.

Speaking of credit, we can't take a lot of credit yet.  There's still a long way to go in the baseball post-season and hopefully the Phillies will play a prominent role in it.

I know that Lea, at least, feels that way.  We got home last night around 9pm (it was a quick game and even with the nightmarish traffic situation that leaving the stadium entails, especially when the atmosphere is a lot like a post-game tailgate party, we got home pretty fast) and the kids were still up.

Sharon brought Hallie upstairs shortly thereafter but Lea was showing no real signs of wanting to go to sleep any time soon.  So I asked her if she wanted to watch Classical Baby, which is her wind-down DVD.  She replied, "No!  Watch baseball!"

Since I was interested in finding out what was going on in the Yankees/Twins game anyway, I happily obliged her.  She then grabbed two of the Phillies caps that we always seem to have hanging around this time of year and placed one on my head and one on hers.  She then requested that I bring her "-attic", which is how she says Phanatic.  I handed her one of our Phanatics and then, upon further request, the other.  The four of us (me, Lea, and the two stuffed green difficult-to-identify-species with big red noses) then sat on the couch and watched the game.  When the crowd on TV got noisy, Lea began to shout, "Go Phillies!  Go Phillies!" and clapped her hands with joy.  I did not have the heart to point out the distinction between red and black pinstripes.  I'm sure she'll figure out her colors at some point down the road.

Between Hallie being able to identify the key players on the Phillies by sight (I am not sure how I am going to break it to her that we are not terribly likely to re-sign her beloved Jayson Werth whom she calls by his first name) and Lea just being enthusiastic about the game, I am pretty sure that I can carry on our baseball-loving family tradition.  I still remain sad that I never got to go to the (old) Yankee Stadium with my dad, who was obviously a baseball fanatic in his own right, but I do hope that he forgives my indiscretion at jettisoning my attachment to the old home team in favor of Phanaticism of a very different spelling.