Opening Day, Saturday March 15, 2008

So the Village Meadows Little League had their official opening day. It was kind of like a carnival type thing, and they had games and the inflatable jumping things for the kids. For this opening day, each team had to put together a basket that was raffled off. So I was the one who had to do it for Dennis' team. It was a huge pain.
Dennis is coaching Ethan's team. They are the Rangers. Each team was introduced so here they are doing their little cheer.
Cade's team is the Nationals. Daniel is on the Diamondbacks, but he was still on his campout so he wasn't there yet.
They had these little bouncing horses that Ethan and ALlison were playing on. Just before I took this picture, there was a huge gust of wind that tipped over one of the big jumping inflatble things. It was full of kids and there were two boyscouts that were up on the top helping. Well the scouts got hurt and paramedics came and the scouts ended up going in to the hospital. I don't know exactly what their injuries were, but I think that one may have hurt his knee and shoulder, and I don't know about the other one. Since Dennis is a lawyer, the little leage board was asking him questions about liability and stuff. It turns out that this things wasn't staked down very well or at all. Dennis is hoping that there won't be any lawsuits from the parents of the kids, but we'll see what happens.

I have been a little frustrated with this whole Little League thing. I like the kids playing, but everything that goes with it has been a pain, like having to do this basket, and chipping in money for each kid to contribute to their teams basket. Also, with raffle tickets, wrist bands for this thing, and just having to outfit the kids to play, I feel like we have been nickled and dimed to the poor house. For those who have one kid playing it's not that big of a deal, but when you have several kids playing like we do, it gets expensive. We actually didn't buy wrist bands for the kids, so they weren't able to do any of the games and jumping things, but they still played on the playground and we had a basket ball they played with. It was hard for them, but I also think that it was good too because it taught them that life goes on and they can't have everything, and they did ok with what they could do.