Guest Post: Wrong Bat Babe

The first thing you should know about Kat from 3 Bedroom Bungalow is she is the reason I don't smell. She very kindly brought me Secret deodorant to CyberMummy (don't get me started on why UK deodorant doesn't work); actually she brought half of the commissary with her to dole out to fellow expats with cravings.  She's crazy generous, hilarious and I wish she didn't live on the other side of the UK or I suspect we'd get up to lots of trouble.  Blondie Boy watches baseball on TV and says "ball ball" but I often wonder what it will be like when he's old enough to play sports that don't really exist in Scotland. Here Kat talks about her own daughter's perception of baseball.

Hi, I'm Kat and I have lived here in the east of England for about 2 and a half years.  My daughters LaLa and KiKi, ages 7 and 5 respectively, have spent most of their cognizant life here in the UK.  They don't really remember much about our life back in the US and most of their memories have been formed here.  They think they are English about ¾ of the time.  Every once in a while, they remember that they are in fact American, and like any typical American will crow about it loudly for couple of days before they revert back to their typically English manerims. 

I live near an American military base (my husband is in the United States Air Force) and they offer typical American sports for the children of the service memembers to sign up to play.  There are basketball leagues in the fall and winter, football teams in the fall (American football, not footy...though they play that too), cheerleading for the girls and in the spring and summer the offer the most American of all sports, Baseball. 

I signed LaLa up to play baseball this year.  When I was discribing the sport to her, I tried my best to sort of tell her the rules and sort of how it was played and the gear that is used.  It was all sort of in a round about way because she really hasn't been exposed to many sports over here in the UK-other than what as an American I would call soccer, but what Brits would call football (it does get rather confusing).  So, eventually I said something along the lines of “you hit the ball with the bat” and her ears immediately perked up.  She got really excited and then yelled “YAY!! I get to play Cricket!”

Wait.  No.  This is baseball.  Don't let your dad, your dad that is obsessed with the great American past time of baseball, hear you call it Cricket!  He would stroke out.  Ok, maybe not stroke out, but he would be highly concerned and feel that he had failed in his very patriotic (he’s big on the patriotic...he's in the military after all) duty, to teach his offspring the ins and outs of baseball.  Thankfully, he's in Korea. 

So guess who gets to teach her about baseball?  Yep, me.  It's going alright.  Well if you don't count the fact that she got so excited when she hit the ball last night that she ran around all the bases with no regard that she was passing her own teammates that were already on base and got called out for it.  Oh well.  We'll get there in the end.  I hope.