Saved by the (tennis) ball

The first thing Eric said to me after he woke up Saturday morning was that he wanted to go to Coe and get his basketball. We had left it about twenty feet up in a tree Friday night.

Friday Colin had a ticket to the Kindergarten Pajama Jam, one of the grade-level events featured in the annual school auction. We walked over there with him after taekwondo, then Lydia, Eric, and I played on the playground until Nicole and Rachel arrived. (Rachel had stayed behind to help teach the lower-level taekwondo class.) Lydia brought the soccer ball to kick around, and Eric brought his little orange Nerf-style basketball.

At some point, Eric didn't want me to pass it back to him anymore, but to throw it as high as I could in the air. I continued to do that, while also kicking the soccer ball to Lydia, or passing a football left behind by Boys & Girls Club to another kid who showed up. Then, much later, Eric went into the park adjacent to the playground and asked me to throw the ball to him there. After a couple throws, I tried to throw it over the trees and into the park. It made it high enough to clear the trees, but not far enough, and came down into the crook of a branch of an ash tree planted in a raised bed that separates park and playground.

I brought the football over and threw it up at the ball a few times, but to no avail. A couple of the throws were on target, but other branches stopped it from reaching Eric's ball. When Nicole and Rachel arrived, they tried too, but had trouble getting the ball up high enough. Eventually, I was frustrated with damage to the tree, and other families had arrived to play in the park,One woman said she thought we were trying to get the bird nest out of the tree. That seemed cruel. so we gave up for the night. Eric was disappointed.

Then, Saturday morning, after breakfast, he and I headed back to Coe with a can of tennis balls. I made ten to fifteen throws from under the tree, but most weren't accurate, and the one or two that were hit obstacles. Finally, I moved a bit farther away where the angle seemed slightly better. From there, my second throw hit the basketball dead on and brought it down from the tree. Eric was quite happy.