Playing catch
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:30 pm by jamesSeems a lot of people are playing catch today. Hundreds of police playing catch all over London (very, very well I might add); an as-yet unidentified (and now dead) victim of a game of catch between his Cessna and the lawn of the Reichstag; and, most importantly, Josie learning to play catch in our back yard (pics in the gallery).
She’s very good. I think I can remember learning to catch, so I must have been older than she is; come to think of it some of my fondest memories of mid-childhood are of Dad and I playing catch with a tennis ball in the yard at Inverness Avenue (Cape Town) … but back to the story … her fine motor skills are not exactly characteristic of Michelle or I which begs the age-old question of genetic origins.
Admittedly, in this particular instance not a tough question to answer – while I’d battle to hold up my end of a friendly game of cricket, I have a brother who’s a scratch golfer. He wasn’t around at the time in question, so one assumes that some of those genes, combined with some of Michelle’s dad’s found their way in combination into Jo.
A more interesting genetic question, perhaps, is how in the world Sophie is on the 91st percentile. To say that Michelle and I are somewhat vertically challenged is possibly something of an understatement. We were both near-shortest in our class before and after, if not during, those obligatory and desperately unsynchronised pubescent growth-spurts. Sophie was born on the 75th percentile for weight, length and head circumference. Over four weeks her weight moved up to the 95th (she likes her food), but of course her height remains on the 75th. I’ve set up a webcam to monitor the postman.
July 25th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Perhaps you or Josie could teach the new boy in the England cricket team how to catch.
The catching gene must be an Anglo-saxon one, the Aussies all seem to have it, and lets face it most of them could play for England if the ECB searched like the RFU searched for players with British ancestry… (mm Mike Catt, Matt Stevens). Whereas the new boy (being South African) well lets say he needs lessons, but boy can he bat!