We're Back! The Eating Machine and I

As my transition to fulltime blogging (say, two posts per week) nears completion, I'm back in the saddle with tales, viewpoints and the wacky things that either entertain or astound in and around the landscape of youth sports.

One of the most amazing things you see on a day-to-day basis is how carefree these kids are. My 14 year-old Mike has morphed - in the space of about 18 months - into an eating machine who is especially dangerous during the summer months. Kind of like a species of prehistoric animal, one with a latin name. Let's see...the Devoursfastfoodasaurus.

Thank God he's playing in two summer basketball leagues and dabbling in jump rope and skills drills, because the calorie burn is critical. And oh can he sleep. Sometimes, like 12 hours at a time. I'm sorry. Did I forget to mention that before that one half-day slumber session he had participated in consecutive XBox-dominated sleepovers during which the boys stubbornly tried to outlast one another until about 3 a.m., before giving in to abject exhaustion?

I mean, like, totally carefree.

The other night, I was on pickup duty for Mike and his friends, who had gone to the regional township fair. Scheduled was a sleepover at our house with two of his friends plus I had to bring home a couple of girls.

I'm an easygoing guy, so I was okay with six, total, in the car. Problem is, Mike showed up with eight, so now it's a total of nine, which would be so clearly against the law that I sought another solution. Since all these kids have cellphones, I figured it should be possible to find another parent who could take a couple of kids off my hands.

But when one of the girls called another whose mom we knew was coming, the calls and texts were ignored. We found out later that that was because the two girls were having "drama." The callee was mad at the caller and not answering.

End result was that I had to make two trips on a Tuesday night following a workday of 10 hours with a call scheduled for 8 a.m. the following morning. Still thinking that cellphone technology would allow for time efficiency, I good-naturedly went about the task of dropping the girls off at their sleepover and making my way back to the fair.

But, when I called Mike to establish the pickup point for the second trip - of course he and his friends who couldn't fit in the car went back into the fair to see what the "drama" queen was mad about - my calls went straight to voice mail because Mike's phone battery was dead. Not sure why I was surprised, since his cell ends up incapacitated in that way about twice per week.

Another month of carefree and then, high school. Think there'll be less "drama," or more?

Stay tuned.....