A Dream Delayed

As our first official family act of summer, Monday night we headed out to the Lakeland Tigers baseball game.  What can I say? We just love baseball!  It is our favorite sport and we know all the players and there is just- okay, okay, it was dollar night and the tickets to get in and then all the food was a dollar.  And so how are we not even supposed to go to this game, huh? Such a deal! The evening started off incredibly magical.  We walked right in, bought 8 hot dogs, 4 sodas, some pretzels and then Luke got chosen to race South Paw, the Tigers Mascot, around the bases.  He was so excited!  He just had to wait til the bottom of the third inning and racing glory would be his!!!

The calm before the storm.  Literally.

And then God must have realized that a truly awful sinner was sitting in the crowd and he decided to unleash his wrath upon the stadium in the form of the most ridiculous thunderstorm I have been in in about five years.  (Or this is Central Florida and it's summer and so what else do you expect?)  And it started right in the bottom of the third inning.  So Luke's chance to show the world his incredible speed would have to wait for another day :(

The grounds crew pulled out the tarps just seconds before the storm arrived.  Luke still got free ice cream and the promotions gal told us to come back another night and she would let him race again, but he was pretty disappointed. I, on the other hand, was chosen to do some sort of "dizzy bat" race in the fourth inning and was quite relieved the game was over :)

Davina, my video fails to capture the magnitude of the storm....and it is quite dark, but here it is, for posterity:




I do want to note that toward the end of the storm, there was a lightning strike so close, we could hear a whizzing sound through the air and the force of the thunder hit us right in the chest.
One of the closer calls of my life, probably.

Dollar night doesn't happen again for a few weeks, so Luke has some time to train.  We are headed to the track right now.  You can't be too careful with South Paw....