When my daughter went to Kindergarten, she came home one day with a “C” in ball. A “C”! Would this mean she’d never get into Harvard? Things like this can have a disastrous impact on a child’s future!

I set up an emergency conference with her teacher It seemed that Chanel had done poorly at catching a ball. Not possible, I insisted. Chanel has no problem catching a ball at home. She has footballs, tennis balls, golf balls, volley balls, basketballs, and even those bouncy balls you get from a machine for a quarter…she can catch all of them!

The teacher went to her closet and pulled out a soft ball made from colorful fabric and filled, it seemed, with some kind of pellet. I had never seen one before. She called it a Nerf ball. What’s this? I asked. And did she really call that thing a ball? It was so lightweight it didn’t go very far when you threw it, it didn’t make any noise, and it would be impossible to break a lamp with one of those things. Not only that, but this was the Northwest, what good would that ball be in the rain?

Well, the teacher stood her ground and I went crawling home (via K-Mart) to buy a Nerf ball with the black cloud of failed motherhood hanging over my head.

Knight, learn how to throw and catch this ball…save yourself! Harvard, Yale, and Brown are waiting for you!

I wrote this little blurb to go with a Nerf ball I gave a toddler   in our family, because that’s what I do. I tell stories about everything…even the little yellow spider I found in my bathroom sink one time in the middle of the night. I made a video about her. She’s a star now! (See Zoe and the Internet Date on YouTube–search Janelle Meraz Hooper for my channel.)