Great day this morning at the ballpark when Collin & Parker's White Sox had a doubleheader against the Royals. Jamie and Grayson were headed to Dallas to see Xanadu so I took the twins and worked with Collin before the game started on a major change in his batting - we switched him from batting right-handed to left. He's seemed so uncomfortable swinging lrighthanded that Jamie suspected he might be like me - writes right-handed but bats left-handed. Turned out we were right - after a couple of practice swings the little toot hit three out of four practice balls I tossed at him (I don't think he had ever made contact with a single ball - even in practice - before that).
Collin bats after Parker (that's him batting and Parker on first base in the above - wonder how many brothers get to follow each other in the batting order) and his first bat up he nailed one in between first and the mound. He dropped the bat (he said the ball knocked it out of his hand which makes sense - he'd never hit a full-speed ball before) so he walked over, picked it up, and calmly went back to the plate to wait for the next pitch (while we are all screaming at him to head for first base). After all, no one ever had told him what to do when he actually hit it!
So the next time up Parker hit a single, and on the second pitch Collin hit a foul ball, but he drops the bat and runs faster than I've ever seen him run to first - where he meets Parker and they high five and jump around. So we're one step closer - we can hit and run. He then strikes out on the next pitch.
Third time's a charm - sort of. Parker has singled again (that's two hits out of three at bat, which is a Smith family record going back two generations, I can safely say) and Collin gets a hit that goes straight forward partway towards the mound, and he drops the bat and starts doing this weird dancing zigzagging run towards first as Parker heads for second. The fielding is so slow (he's put the ball right where the pitcher and catcher can't figure out whose ball it is) that he gets on base, and only then does he turn and we can see he's screaming and there's blood coming from his hand - the ball hit his left thumb. But he was determined that he was going to make it to base - he just couldn't do it in a straight line. So we take him and ice it down and he's so brave and stops crying and we go sit in the dugout and show off this really cool cut on his thumb and how purple it is under the nail (his teammates think it's really cool).
We come home and put a Sponge Bob band-aid on it and he figures out how to play DS with it, goes swimming with it, and when he comes in after that to get a new band-aid because the old one came off, he's forgotten which finger was hurt and he's trying to get me to do his right index finger because it now has a small cut. So he's fine. But it was a good day for both the boys - for some reason Parker has now started connecting, and Collin is a different player now that he's batting lefty. Jamie was right - just one more tiny way he's like his dad (God help him).