Tennis turned Catch in the Street

This week is Spring Break in Cali, which means we have an extra body in our house. It's loud, and silly, and absolutely nutty, but we wouldn't have it any other way. The unfortunate thing for Ellie is that since our spring break was last week, her visit is at a time when we all have to go to school and that is not so fun for her. She has sat in class with her kindle while Jim teaches and been juggled around with two tired and busy people. Plus, Aeryn has track practice after school and an hour of homework which pretty much takes up most of the afternoon. It's safe to say Ellie has been quite disappointed about that. 

The school district just put in new tennis courts by our apartment and we've been planning all week on going to hit some tennis balls. Today the weather was perfect and the timing worked out wonderfully for us, but as it turns out the high school had some sort of tennis match going on so we weren't able to play after all.

Enter: the street. The buildings are getting new siding and as of this week our immediate parking and play area have become the construction material storage areas. It's going to be a bit inconvenient, to say the least, as it should be this way for a few months. I'm not sure the office loved us hitting balls around the parking lot, but since our play area is barricaded and they've closed this to through traffic it was pretty convenient for us.

Ellie was excited to hit tennis balls, and then Jim realized he'd shirked his parenting responsibility and never taught her to throw a ball. Honestly, I don't believe it. He has pictures of her hiking a football at age 2 and she had sports jerseys for the Angels, BYU, ManU, and a few other teams so the fact that he had missed this all important lesson is mind boggling. The tennis lessons then morphed to how to throw. She picked it up pretty quickly, since she is naturally athletic after all, and they did that for quite some time. 

Tate thought it was pretty cool too. He carried a racket around for at least thirty minutes and giggled every time Ellie would swing or throw. Jim made the most awesome squished face pretty much every time they would swing.

I'm SO glad they put this orange mesh fence up. Yesterday we were talking about how likely it was that we'd have to fish Tate out from underneath it at some point. Now I can let him roam a little more than I was expecting and not be quite so worried about it.

Plus, it means I get cute pics of Tate playing in front of caution tape.

The playground is also out of commission for a few months, unfortunately. We use this little thing all the time. Now we have to walk all of 30 yards to a much bigger park. Oh, the misery.

Across from us the neighbors are fully immersed in scaffolding and construction prep. Our turn will come in a few weeks and I am not terribly excited for it. We had the chance to move for "free" into an apartment that already had the work completed to avoid the noise and commotion, but I'm not excited enough about the cleaning that goes along with moving out to commit to that, even if I am incredibly tempted at this very moment.

(doesn't that look fun???)