On Labor Day weekend, my family and I attended a college
football game. Labor Day Weekend is the first official week of
college football.
Is it? I don’t really
know.
But each year, a few weeks before Labor Day, my husband gets that look in his eyes that I try to avoid at all costs.
Not the one you’re thinking about, ya pervs.
The one I’m talking about is the one where he gets all dewy
eyed thinking about men crashing into each other wearing tight pants and big
shoulder pads. The one where their masculinity
is highlighted, as if anybody needs more of that nonsense. I don’t get it. If you’d like an idea about how much I don’t
get it, see here. Or here. And here.
Again.
Anyway, every year my husband makes a big deal about our
whole family going to see a live college football game, and he fixes me with a
different look, the one that implies that my life will be a living hell full of
football talk and football tickets and sports bars and beer and football
parties at our house just out of spite if I don’t agree to it just once IT’S
JUST ONE GAME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IS IT REALLY SO BAD?
Um, yes. It is that
bad.
It’s that bad because I hate football, but also because we tailgate, which is just like
camping, which really isn’t what I call a good time. I don’t like to spend much time outside
anyway because of bugs and wind and rain and unpredictable weather
patterns and unreliable weather forecasts but when you add packing up so much stuff
to entertain yourself and eat that there is barely enough room in your car for
four people, I get a little twitchy.
As my mother-in-law put it as we were readying the coolers
(yes, coolerSSSSS) to transport all manner of food and drink and inventorying
the grocery bags full of snacks and paper products and water for drinking and
water for cleaning and rags and knives and kitchen utensils and condiments and
special beer can holders and chairs and a tent and grill and propane and footballs and custom
collegiate official tailgating beanbag game and tablecloths and OMG is there
anything else a family of four could possibly need to take with them to a
football game, “Isn’t this a lot of work just for a football game?”
I have never loved my mother-in-law as much as I did at that
moment, when my husband was practically squeeing with excitement, completely
lacking the realization that his wife would rather do anything other than attend
a football event for twelve hours, not to mention we were doing all this work for said football
event. My mother-in-law got that this
was madness.
And I tucked this small validation into my back pocket, and away
we went to the football game.
We set up our campsite (let’s call it what it is, shall we)
and cooked and ate and drank, and two hours later we cleaned up and packed up
the truck again to walk five miles to the stadium. When we got there, we took our seats with the
hundred thousand fans around us, and my daughter, who had taken a Benadryl to
combat the allergic reaction she had to a bug bite, promptly put her sweaty
head in my sweaty lap for an antihistamine nap.
When she came to, she and I left our seats and walked around the stadium for
three hours and ate ice cream and put our heads close to the mister fans which
served as our in-stadium entertainment until our hair was wet. We met the boys back at our seats at the end of the game where we
learned that our team had lost. We
walked back to the campsite where we unpacked the truck and re-set up camp and cooked
and ate and drank again. Did I mention
porta-potties?
And when we were finished, we cleaned up, packed up, and
left. We unpacked once more when we got
home.
And once we got there, it was MY turn to give the look. You know the one I mean.
*******
Wow that is a full family adventure! Think about all the browie points you just got with your hubby! lol.
ReplyDeleteThe only Brownie points I ever get are when I make the brownies and then eat them myself.
DeleteWow. I am truly sorry. :( And truly grateful that my Husband is not a sports fan!
ReplyDeleteYou are significantly more blessed than I am.
DeleteThat sounds like hell. I'm guessing you had to do most of the packing/unpacking? You should get a prize when it's all over.
ReplyDeleteI should get a prize. It should be that football is banned from the world forever.
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