Hello, this is Mike. Allison asked me to write this post. As evident from the pictures, the Miedema family attempted to take in a Twins game this evening. Attempted is an appropriate word as we were back in the van by the middle of the 5th inning. Though the evening was cut short, we packed a lot of activity into 5 innings of baseball. I'm afraid Hailey's vocabulary probably expanded tonight as Wednesday night is student ID night - the U of MN students get upper deck tickets for $4 - so we were surrounded by hundreds of University students who apparently were quite dehydrated as they each required a beer an inning. Before the game even started, a fist fight nearly broke out 4 rows above us and the across the isle there was a coed group that were very friendly with each other and not opposed to physical displays of affection. Needless to say, we are now considering home-schooling our children for college. As expected, Hailey and Carter were not the problem when it came to managing our children. Taylor stayed in her seat for the first 2 batters (not that she was watching). She then proceeded to amp herself up by eating cotton candy by the fistful and drinking half of a 32 oz Coke. She started to test the waters by walking up and down the steps. The low point came when she crawled under the legs of a drunk college student sitting in front of us. Allison went to retrieve her but not before she proceeded to eat a few treats off of the dome floor. She cried when she was forced to sit with her family because she wanted "mo snyacks", referring to the beer-soaked Mike&Ike's she'd just consumed. We were forced to make a second run for concessions in order to get more ammo for Taylor. While our pre-game plan had included a second trip for concessions I don't think we were planning on it happening in the second inning. Our second round of treats were gone before the third inning started at which point Taylor stated "wanna go home".
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hailey actually crawled on the floor to her seat due to fear of heights and "falling into the twins game". I think the odds of making it through a complete game would be higher with 4 Hailey's, 2 Carters, 1 parent, and a pet monkey versus 1 Taylor, 2 parents, and a nanny.
Tomorrow will be our 9th wedding anniversary. I think if we could have looked into the crystal ball 9 years ago and saw tonight's events we would have thought: wow, those are some cute kids and wow, this is going to be a wild ride.
