Twins Night(mare)

Each year, our elementary school offers a Twins night. It's great because they take care of buying the tickets, driving us to the stadium via school bus, and bringing us back home through traffic late at night. It's really the only way to easily do it with small kids. This year, there were only 300 tickets available, but there was a request from families for 700. A lottery was had, and we were some of the lucky few chosen to go.

Bob was supposed to come with us, but backed out at the last minute due to an exhausting work week. It was really too bad, because it was going to be a great time for both of us to get away with only 3 of the other kids, leaving the baby behind with Alex. It was going to be great. Instead, it was, well....interesting.

Laura was picked to go instead. However, the poor girl had contracted my nasty cold, and fell asleep before the bus was even 10 miles from departure. She spent the rest of the evening complaining she was tired, asking for food of all sorts, needing to go to the bathroom a bazillion times, and causing an incident which spilled a nearly full commuter mug of hot chocolate all over the sweatshirts and bags of the people sitting in the row in front of us. Though we had awesome seats in the second row on the first base foul line, I don't think she watched a single minute of the game. She rounded out the evening by puking in the crowd on our way out of the crowded stadium. Umm, hmmm. Perhaps a bit too many snacks, me thinks?

Tubby was a good little dude and had been excited to go from the beginning. He marvelled at the size of the stadium, and appreciated the big screen and other techno-cool things found throughout. He cheered for the "guys wearing white pants" and got excited at the right times with the rest of the crowd. He made a cute appearance on the pre-game national tv show as he sat atop Jonny's shoulders behind Anthony Lapanta (who was our neighbor's brother at our old house), waving and waving each time the camera panned his way. So cute! Crispy, Jonny, and I also made brief appearances, and if you looked really closely, you could catch a glimpse of Laura hiding behind us. Bob was able to record a short clip and watch us live from the big screen at home. Kind of fun!

Jonny and Crispy had a great time watching the game. It was really exciting to be there, and the stadium really is gorgeous. It is so much more fun watching baseball in the real out of doors where baseball belongs. The evening was lovely as well. Jonny has taken such an interest in baseball, and does not miss a single game at home. So for him, this was a mini-dream come true. He thought the whole experience at the stadium was quite "sweet!". Crispy is getting involved as well. Not so much that he wants to play, like Jonny does, but enough that he has been joining us in our baseball viewing at home. The Twins did not win, but it was a fun game to watch, anyhow. You just can't help but to be excited in that atmosphere! The two of them behaved wonderfully, as always, and were great helpers with the younger ones as we navigated the crowds.

On our way out, we went out the nearest gate, knowing that it was not the one we entered, but because of above mentioned puking incident, we just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. Turns out that this stadium does not follow a rounded, curved path from gate to gate as most other arenas do, and we found ourselves one half mile away from our bus, travelling the wrong direction in the middle of a horrible location in downtown Minneapolis. So there I was, dragging my kids at 10pm past drug dealers, hookers, and other unseemly folks through dark streets, and finally down an alley under a bridge to get to our bus. It was one of the scariest, most awful things I have ever experienced, and something I would never ever in a million years want to expose my kids to. Not to mention the fear that 1)we just not make it out alive and 2)if we did make it through there alive, the bus could very well be gone and we would be stranded. By some miracle, we did make it just as the last person was boarding, and slumped into our seats. It was just so awful, I silently cried, while my kids played some silly alphabet game to pass the time, thankfully being completely unaware (except for Jonny, of course) of all the dangers we had just waded through.

And with that ends my desire to make this an annual fall event as it has been for us over the last several years. If it is going to happen again next year, Bob better be the one going. This gal here, just doesn't have the heart enough for baseball to go through that again.