School night

For the first time in more than three months, tonight is a “school night” in our house. This means our younger two children – rising 12^th-grader Natalie and rising 8^th-grader James – cannot leisurely sleep in tomorrow morning; and trust me, there's been plenty of THAT around here. There are buses to catch, first bells to make, homerooms to get acquainted with, as a new school year dawns. It seems like last week that I was fretting over the start of summer break for them (well, especially James), and how we would keep from hearing the familiar “I’m bored” refrain of summer. Well, somehow the end of June quickly became the beginning of September. And here we are. Natalie is ready for her final year of high school. James? Well, he recently described today (the last day of summer break) as being “one of the two worst days” of the year (the other being the day after Christmas). We have had some middle school issues with our youngest son. Seventh grade was definitely a challenge on many fronts; it was far from smooth sailing. With a few blips, though, we’ve had a good summer. We have bonded over baseball – on TV and at Citi Field. He has embraced analytics similarly to me; we discuss pitch counts (both not big fans of it), on-base percentage (both big fans of it), BABIP (I’m a big believer, he doesn’t care), WHIP (important), WAR (what is it good for?), and why New York Mets broadcasts are so vastly superior to New York Yankees broadcasts that they shouldn’t even share the same cable box (simple facts). We have grown to make Jeff McNeil at-bats much-watch TV. Mostly, we have had a common language, something to talk about, after a school year in which his primary mode of communication with me was in grunts and one-word sentences (standard middle-school procedure). So tonight, he (they) needs to go to bed a little earlier. There will be no more late innings for us to share on TV. Summer is in its late innings, with a call to the bullpen for autumn on the way. School night.