Tag Archives: knicks

Jan
12
2014

The Basketball Diaries

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DSC00210Oddly enough, basketball has gotten in the way of my blog this week.

No, I do not play basketball. I barely even understand the game, although I’ve had four kids play on travel teams and logged in quite a few hours sitting on bleachers over the years.

Someone tried to explain what “full-court press” meant during a game yesterday, and I think I’m finally wrapping my brain around that, um, maneuver. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand all that fouling. I’m never looking at the right place during play to figure that stuff out.

Currently, my 11-year-old son is playing on both a travel team and a rec team through our town and I’ve got about three games a week to pay attention to.

Not to mention all those practices.

Okay, it’s really not taking up that much of my time and I could probably squeeze my writing in really early in the morning, as is usually the case. If I could just get out of bed.

For whatever reason, that’s been the challenge, lately.

We did have one pretty late night this week, when I took my guys into the city to see the Knicks play the Heat and celebrate Dude Night 2.

I gave the boys the tickets for Christmas and unlike last year, when I tried to research the perfect game to go to and did a lot of Googling of team stats and asking guys I knew their opinion on the matter, this year I just looked for the date that worked for us and bought the tickets.

The boys opened the boxes the I had wrapped the printout of the tickets in with some new Knicks t-shirts, and my older guy was immediately like, “Wow!” when he saw they were “versing” the Heat (because “to vs.” somebody is a very real verb in my house).

“We gonna see LeBron!” he said, high-fiving his little brother and when he saw the confusion on my face, he asked, “Mom, do you know who that is?”

“Of course I’ve heard of LeBron James,” I said indignantly. “Who does he play for again?”

Since then, my older son has schooled me on a few things about the NBA and I came to terms with the fact that we were probably going to just watch LeBron wipe up the Knicks at the game Thursday night, and we were all okay with that.

We ate hamburgers at some pretty sketchy pub on 7th Avenue and walked over to MSG to claim our seats that I paid a million dollars for on StubHub, high above all the fancy people like Katie Holmes, Michael J. Fox and David Duchovney sitting courtside (I only know they were there because the celebs were featured throughout the game on the big video hanging over the court).

So we were amazed and thrilled when the Knicks not only kept up with the Heat throughout the game but pulled ahead in the fourth quarter and won.

It put us all in a great mood for the hour drive home to New Jersey.

We even added the win to our Big Bucket of Memories we started for 2014. On a yellow slip of paper, my little guy wrote: Mom, Max and I saw/went to our first Knicks game win! Agains the HEAT!

I can’t wait to remember that one in December.

In the meantime, we’ve got another basketball game today, this time about a half hour from home, that should eat up much of my beloved Sunday and while there will be no LeBron or Carmelo Anthony on the court, it’s always fun to watch my little guy play.

When I wasn’t watching or driving to basketball games this week, I did manage to pen an ode to my new favorite wardrobe staple.

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photo(92)The Polar Vortex Has Frozen My Sense of Style

By now, we are all well-versed on the potential hazards posed by the record-breaking temperatures that have plunged the country into a deep freeze.

Just turn on the TV for a couple of minutes and you’ll be immediately terrified by the mighty wrath of the polar vortex. (READ MORE … )

 

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I was also excited to have a post featured on BlogHer this week, especially since I was really pleased with how it turned out.

photo 2How Not to Hate Your Teens

If you’re like me, you are finding that it’s not always so easy to like all the people who you’re living with. Much less love them.

At least once a day, I find myself in a combative situation or heated conversation with someone I gave birth to.

I even made that observation aloud to one of them this week, in the midst of one such episode, “This is not how people usually talk to me.”

But he just grunted and kept at it. (READ MORE … )

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And I’d be remiss not to remind all you fine people that you can sign up to get new posts emailed straight to your inbox. You don’t even have to find me through Facebook.

Just fill your email address in the “Subscribe to blog via email” box, which is to the right of this post if you’re on your laptop or if you scroll way to the bottom if you’re reading this on your phone. Just keep scrolling, it’s there. Fill in your email address and then go to your inbox where an email will be waiting that you need to open to confirm your subscription.

Presto!

 

 

 

 

Jan
20
2013

dude night

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As the girliest of girls, I am an advocate of activities like shopping, spa days and seeing big Broadway musicals. And as the mother of two, now-teenage, daughters, I have enjoyed looping them into my girly fun.

Over the years, we have done the requisite mall excursions, mani/pedi outings and weekend getaways to Vermont with more girls to check out foliage and farm markets and browse the local book store.

And my two boys were having none of it.

“You know mom, that’s just not fair that the girls always get to do special things,” my 10 year old son told me not long ago.

His brother, older by a decade (and who never seems in such a hurry to really do anything with me), chimed in, “It’s true, mom. You never take us anywhere.”

They needed a dude day.

So I decided that I would get tickets for the three of us to go see a Knicks game and give them to the boys for Christmas. It seemed like a simple win-win: the older guy is a huge NBA fan and the little one just likes sports.

But, maybe because I need to make a big production out of everything or have to know every detail before I make a decision, I had a hard time pulling the trigger and clicking the “Buy” button as I searched for them online.

First of all, do you know how much tickets to a professional basketball game cost? You have to buy them through Stub Hub because all of the scalpers have already scooped up every ticket for every game at Madison Square Garden and would like you to pay double the face value. Thieves.

So now that it’s turning into more of an investment, I needed to make sure we’re going to the perfect game and have the best seats. The Bulls or the Celtics? All the way up top in the center, or down a little lower behind the net?

Who knew being a dude was so much work?

Eventually, I sealed the deal, printed out our tickets and wrapped them up for Christmas and when the boys opened their boxes that morning, I could tell they were duly impressed.

I navigated us into the city on a rainy Friday night and took them to a midtown pub for a dinner of chicken wings and a pizza loaded with three different types of meat. Man fare. I ate a salad and drank chardonnay.

We joined the throng entering the Garden off Seventh Avenue and I navigated the boys off to the right where fans were lined up three-deep in front of a glass counter filled with Knicks merchandise and hawking all the premiere names.

Growing up, my kids knew not to ask. Whether we were in a supermarket or at Disney World, they just knew that I wasn’t going to buy them that pack of gum at the checkout or the water bottle with the misting fan atop, so there was no use asking.

“Do you want one?” I asked the youngest as he eyed the row of blue and white jerseys hanging in front of him.

He stepped closer to his brother and said in a half-whisper, “Did you hear that? She said we could get one.”

My oldest son is too-cool-for-school. He rocked the skinny jeans and the Bieber hairdo long before the looks were de rigeur for the middle school set. But when the vendor handed him his white Carmelo Anthony jersey, he slipped it right on over what he was wearing and readjusted his Knicks baseball cap — flipped backwards — just right on his head.

Standing behind the two of them as we took the five escalators required to get to our seats high up in the arena, I knew that however much I paid for those crazy expensive basketball jerseys, it was like that VISA commercial.

Tickets to Knicks game: lots of dollars. Parking for train into city: too much. Pizza and burgers: more than you’d ever pay at home. Knicks jerseys: I’d never want you to know.

Spending the night sitting in between your two sons and cheering for your team while they explain everything about the sport of basketball to you for two hours: Priceless.