The hook by the door from the garage is empty. For about 18 years it held a mesh bag of shin guards, a batting helmet or a pair of cleats tied together by the laces, usually caked with mud from some field in Springboro. This morning I hung my garden gloves on it, and that felt like an announcement.
It is the middle of April, which used to be the busiest stretch of our year. Emily played softball through high school. Josh played soccer in the fall and baseball in the spring until he graduated in 2022. Even the years after that, spring still felt like it belonged to somebody's schedule. This is the first one that belongs to us.
I wanted to know what that actually freed up, so I went back through the green notebook and my old wall calendars. I keep everything. Greg says it is a fire hazard. He is not wrong.
The hours
In a typical spring when Josh was in high school baseball, we had two practices a week that needed a ride and two games, sometimes three. Practices were across town, so a drop-off and pickup was about 40 minutes of driving each. Games were two to three hours with travel, more for away games in Lebanon or Miamisburg.
When I add it up for a typical week:
- Practice driving: 4 trips at 40 minutes, about 2 hours and 40 minutes.
- Games: about 7 hours, counting travel.
- Laundry for uniforms and practice clothes: maybe 1 extra hour.
- The Saturday tournament, about every third week: call it 3 hours averaged out.
That is close to 14 hours a week, for about 12 weeks every spring. Something like 165 hours a season. I never once thought of it as a cost, and I would not trade a single one of those bleacher afternoons. But it is a real number, and this spring it is mine.
The dollars
The money surprised me more. From the notebook, a typical baseball spring for Josh looked like this: league or school fees around $250, cleats $70 (he went through a pair a year once his feet stopped growing at size 12), a bat every other year at about $180, so $90 a year, gloves and batting gloves about $40, and the concession stand. I wrote down concession spending one spring out of curiosity. It was $186. Hot dogs and Gatorade add up.
Then gas. Greg's truck was not the one doing the driving; I had a smaller car then, and I estimated about 60 extra miles a week. At 25 miles per gallon and the $3.40 or so we paid back then, that is roughly $8 a week, close to $100 a season.
All in, a spring season ran somewhere around $780 for one kid. For the years when Emily was still playing too, it was easily double that.
We did not suddenly get $780 back in the bank this April, because we stopped spending it three years ago when Josh graduated. But it is a useful reminder that a lot of what we think of as our fixed costs were really kid costs, and they quietly went away without anyone moving the money somewhere useful.
Where the time is going instead
Honestly, a lot of it went into the kids' rooms this spring. Emily's room and Josh's room are mostly cleared now, and next Saturday we are having a garage sale with the leftovers: two twin bed frames, a desk, a bin of trophies I could not bring myself to throw out, and enough sports equipment to outfit a small team. I have priced the bats at $15. Greg thinks $20. We will see who is right.
Some of it went into paperwork that is not much fun. Late last month I found out I will lose my school-district health plan at the end of June when I leave. I am working through what comes next and I will write that up properly once we decide.
And Greg and I just had our first real sit-down with the retirement numbers, an evening with the spreadsheet Emily set up, a calculator and a pot of coffee. That one deserves its own post too.
Some of the time, though, is just time. Last Tuesday evening Greg and I walked a stretch of the Great Miami River trail at 6:30, when we would have been sitting on aluminum bleachers. His knee held up for about two miles. We got ice cream on the way home. Nobody needed a ride anywhere.
I miss the cleats a little. I do not miss the smell of them in a closed car in May. Both things are true.
