Before this school year came to an abrupt halt, Corin was making good friends in our immediate neighborhood. For those of you who haven’t visited our house in a while, we live in a relatively small cluster of houses that is bounded by a city bike trail on one side, a nature park on another, and a freeway on the third. We’ve been even more isolated than normal in the past year because freeway construction took out the bridge that used to link us to the main part of our subdivision. When drives to school, slightly less than a mile away across the construction pit, take 10 minutes, it’s particularly good to have friends whose houses are on the same side.
The houses in our neighborhood are basically arranged in two semi-circles with a park in the middle. Part of the park has a playscape, but about two thirds of the area is just open space. The part nearest the playscape has trees, but the far end is wide open, and you often find kids playing football, soccer, or baseball there or adults letting their dogs play fetch. Corin had taken to meeting his friends at this park at least once a week, and we had even gotten walkie-talkies to communicate with him while he was there. It was becoming clear, though, that we’d need more than communication devices. Corin’s friends all play sports, and though he insisted that he did not want to play on a team, he did want some balls to play with at the park: a wiffle-ball and bat, a football, a frisbee...
It probably will not shock any of you that we had none of those things readily available at home. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Matt and I are not sporty. Matt is fairly athletic; he’s run five marathons, after all, and I’ve been a passable runner for several years now. But sports? Things that require teamwork and coordination? Not so much.
I had planned to get Corin a few of those items over Spring Break, but then, Coronavirus happened, and suddenly ship times on Amazon were a week long, and going to crowded stores seemed unappealing. Instead, early in that first week, I asked Matt to try our favorite local toy store, thinking it would be less crowded, and indeed, Matt was the only one there. Their outdoor section is small all the time, and it was running low when Matt arrived. Of our desired items, they had only a frisbee, and it was not the soft one I had been envisioning. It was a plastic disk with embedded lights that activated when the frisbee spun. It was, accordingly, a bit more expensive than I’d planned for, but we figured that something was better than nothing, so we bought it.
What a good choice that was. It turns out that a light-up frisbee is excellent for socially distant trips to the park. The first time we took it out, we went at night just to see what the lights were like, and we found that if you go to the park at 8pm, nobody else is there. We’ve been several times now, and we’ve only had company once: a young couple who were sitting and chatting with each other several yards away. Better still, you have to stand fairly far apart to play catch with a frisbee, and you don't need to get it near your face.
Of course, none of us but Matt really knew how to throw a frisbee, and it was a comedy of errors at first. In our defense, it’s a bit tricky aiming a frisbee when you can’t always see the person you’re throwing to. There are only a few streetlights around the park, and when a person is not standing near one, they are hard to see, especially when they wear dark clothing. This led to the name “night ninja frisbee,” and it has come to involve a variety of games from simple two-person catch, to monkey-in-the-middle, to distance throwing contests. We’ve also tried standing in a rectangle and counting how many consecutive catches we could make around the circuit. (Our current record is 9.)
Night Ninja Frisbee has been quite the happy accident: a chance to get out of the house for some fresh air, exercise, and family time. Austin is instituting a Stay at Home Order tonight at midnight, though, so I’m not sure if we’ll be able to continue. While household gatherings and outdoor exercise are both expressly permitted, I'm not sure if they are permitted together. Even if we walked to and from the park maintaining social distancing, shared equipment might be frowned upon, even among a family group. It may be that tonight was the last round of Night Ninja Frisbee for a while, but it was fun while it lasted.
The houses in our neighborhood are basically arranged in two semi-circles with a park in the middle. Part of the park has a playscape, but about two thirds of the area is just open space. The part nearest the playscape has trees, but the far end is wide open, and you often find kids playing football, soccer, or baseball there or adults letting their dogs play fetch. Corin had taken to meeting his friends at this park at least once a week, and we had even gotten walkie-talkies to communicate with him while he was there. It was becoming clear, though, that we’d need more than communication devices. Corin’s friends all play sports, and though he insisted that he did not want to play on a team, he did want some balls to play with at the park: a wiffle-ball and bat, a football, a frisbee...
It probably will not shock any of you that we had none of those things readily available at home. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Matt and I are not sporty. Matt is fairly athletic; he’s run five marathons, after all, and I’ve been a passable runner for several years now. But sports? Things that require teamwork and coordination? Not so much.
I had planned to get Corin a few of those items over Spring Break, but then, Coronavirus happened, and suddenly ship times on Amazon were a week long, and going to crowded stores seemed unappealing. Instead, early in that first week, I asked Matt to try our favorite local toy store, thinking it would be less crowded, and indeed, Matt was the only one there. Their outdoor section is small all the time, and it was running low when Matt arrived. Of our desired items, they had only a frisbee, and it was not the soft one I had been envisioning. It was a plastic disk with embedded lights that activated when the frisbee spun. It was, accordingly, a bit more expensive than I’d planned for, but we figured that something was better than nothing, so we bought it.
What a good choice that was. It turns out that a light-up frisbee is excellent for socially distant trips to the park. The first time we took it out, we went at night just to see what the lights were like, and we found that if you go to the park at 8pm, nobody else is there. We’ve been several times now, and we’ve only had company once: a young couple who were sitting and chatting with each other several yards away. Better still, you have to stand fairly far apart to play catch with a frisbee, and you don't need to get it near your face.
Of course, none of us but Matt really knew how to throw a frisbee, and it was a comedy of errors at first. In our defense, it’s a bit tricky aiming a frisbee when you can’t always see the person you’re throwing to. There are only a few streetlights around the park, and when a person is not standing near one, they are hard to see, especially when they wear dark clothing. This led to the name “night ninja frisbee,” and it has come to involve a variety of games from simple two-person catch, to monkey-in-the-middle, to distance throwing contests. We’ve also tried standing in a rectangle and counting how many consecutive catches we could make around the circuit. (Our current record is 9.)
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