aabhowell

Today was an amazing day.

This morning I ran my first race of the year, a new 5K near Central Square in Cambridge, MA. It was a bit of a hectic start – I worked until 2:30 am, and in my tiredness forgot my racing bib at the house. Luckily, there was enough time to head back to the house and pick it up, and I arrived at the start line with about two minutes to spare. The race was solid, and given all the factors I think I did pretty well. All in all a promising start to the race season.

Immediately after I finished, we had to boogie home so I could shower and get ready for the second part of our day, and arguably one of the best times I’ve ever had. Adopting from foster care means having many different people becoming intimately involved in your life, which can have its drawbacks. What it also means is that those same people, who are often given packages from different organizations as gifts, think of you when they have the opportunity to dole those perks out. Today we got to use one of them.

Thanks to both the Umps Care charity and Wendy’s Wonderful Kids Foundation, we were given a hell of a trip to Fenway Park today. It started when we arrived at Gate D. We spoke with one of the people handling the immense crowds and long lines, and were instantly whisked to a different queue near the gate where there was essentially no line. We had to wait for a bit there for the park to open, but once we were greeted by the lovely Red Sox PR person things moved rather quickly.

We were all given nice schwag bags (they each had an official MLB baseball, some ballpark food, a pretty nice New Era Red Sox hat, and some spending money for the game) and quickly shown through the ballpark past security to where the umpire locker room was.

All members of the umpiring crew for today’s game came out to meet us, and invited us into their locker room to check things out. They were amazingly nice guys, and after chatting with them I think I have a new appreciation for their job and how tough it can be. After the quick tour of their room and some chit chat, we headed through a weird part of the ballpark to…

The field! Holy crap – we got to walk on the field at Fenway before the game started. So. Damn. Cool. And yes, the grass really was that green – it was beautiful. We also got to check out the Green Monster (I touched it!) and go behind it to see all the signatures in there. I found Tom Petty’s and Ted Williams’s.

We all posed for some pictures in front of the scoreboard, and then headed back to stands to take our seats.

We had great seats, right behind home plate, and we got to watch a pretty fun game. I was initially worried when I learned that John Lackey was going to start today, but he was pretty solid through six innings and the team did a great job of producing runs. The game ended on a fantastic diving catch by Jonny Gomes. All in all, one of the best days in recent memory.