Tigress Woods

It's Avery's third birthday today and as I eluded to in the last post, Jodi and I took Avery to play minigolf on Sunday evening. There's this crappy little course by our house with animals at each hole. They have a big polar bear out front and Avery loves polar bears so we figured she'd have fun.

She's never been minigolfing before, in fact she's never swung a golf club or putter before. I've tried on many occasions to show her how so I can get a feel for if she golfs left or right (so I can buy the proper clubs) but she wants nothing to do with it. She actually prefers hockey (so it's not all bad news)!

Anyway, we get to the course and the guy at the counter takes one look at her and decides she's too small to charge to play. Score. That's 3 bucks in my pocket. We get up to the first tee which was some sort of funny tube that was supposed to be a rocket (OK, so not all holes had an animal). I put the ball down on the mat and stood above Avery and showed her how to put her feet then I asked her to hold the club. She held it left, so we went with that. I held her hands to keep the putter straight and told her to pull it back and then "whack the ball".

She did exactly as I told her and the ball goes sailing through this long tube and out the other end and whipping right past the hole to the railing where it bounced off and took a little hop and landed right in the cup. A freaking hole in one on her first ever shot with a golf club. That has to be some sort of record. Funny thing is, Avery kept calling it "Mickey Mouse" instead of "minigolf" and didn't have a clue what a "putter" or "club" was - it was her "hockey stick" or "whacker thing". Man, you can't put a price on moments like those.

So Avery cruises along until about the 8th hole. Right before she hits the ball she looks down and sees a whole bunch of little caterpillars on the astroturf. She drops her putter and screams "caterpillars! Look, little caterpillars! They will turn into butterflies. This one is away from his mommy and daddy (she picks it up and walks it over to another one lying on the ground). There you go, back home now". At any rate, suffice it to say that Avery's game suffered greatly after the discovery of actual wildlife on the course. Oh well, she is still only 3 years old.

We get to the end of the course and there's this big ramp with a horribly drawn picture of a clown face at the end with a wide open mouth with a hole in it where the ball goes through. Avery says, "What this hole? I have to hit it through the big scary thing?" I've never thought about it but I guess to a kid clowns are freaking scary. This thing was certainly nothing to look at, that's for sure. She hits the ball a few dozen times then crawls up under the protective grate (so the ball doesn't launch into the parking lot) and throws the ball into the hole. She then crawls out and runs around to the other side where she realizes for the first time that the ball is not coming back. Of course, this leads to a complete meltdown as we try to explain to her that that's how minigolf works - you don't get to keep the ball after the last hole, you have to give it back so someone else can have a turn. In hindsight we probably could have prepared her for that a little better. Oh well, I'm still new to all this parenting stuff, sometimes you miss one.

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Does anyone else have a three year old who can spell their name? Seriously, we were picnicking with this kid and his dad goes, "Connor, spell 'Connor'", and the kid rhymes off "C-O-N-N-O-R". "Now Avery". "A-V-E-R-Y", along with a whole host of other words. Is this normal? His parents tried to downplay the fact that he's always liked letters and numbers and just took to spelling naturally, but me and Jodi and the other mom there were like, "What the f**k? If he starts playing Bach on the toy xylophone I'm getting a flippin tutor". Anyhow, I'm trying to teach her how to spell "raspberry" to one up this little Connor genius. We'll see how it goes.