Ethnography Rough Draft
The subculture that I’ve been recently observed is my son’s baseball team. He recently joined the pinto league which is for boy’s ages seven to eight years old. So it is something completely new for him as well as me. I don’t have any siblings that played baseball so I have never been around dugouts and baseball fields, and didn’t know much about the different leagues.
The league is basically for learning, it’s not yet little league, so the observations I made was. Basic baseball skills being taught, the coach’s really worked on building teamwork and friendship, especially the head coach of his team. He had a talk with the parents before one of the games, he said it’s about the kids, we should always encourage the children whether they win or lose! This made him different from the other coaches in the league. The other coaches yelled while my son’s coach used a different approach.
There was a situation when one of the boys was putting down another team member. It was not tolerated, I was extremely surprised to see an otherwise very calm quiet coach really lose his temper that was the first and last time I saw any of the kids try that. All they wanted to hear is the teammates encouraging each other. Whether it’s with a pat on the back after a strike out, or with there songs and team cheers each team has. They also have nicknames they would give each other. The nicknames are after sodas which has a story behind it. Well the team would have really slow starts so the parents, yes including me, are all guilty of it. We would give our little boys so soda at nine in the morning as soon as the sugar would hit there systems they were ready to play. The kids thought to themselves this is awesome soda at nine in the morning so they each have their favorite soda and that’s how they got their nicknames, and a sugar rush. I had to draw the line with the giant pixie sticks that some of the kids had along with their soda.
Another part of the team, is the parents who all started of as strangers and by sitting on metal bleachers and sharing in our children’s victories and defeats have made us fast acquaintances. Even though we all received the coaches talk about the parents having good sportsmanship as well as the children there was still a couple in the bunch who got a little too passionate and at times where not as good examples as they should have been. But who can blame them we do tend to get passionate when our children are involved. So along the folding chairs, blankets and concession stand goodies we go there to cheer on our little boys.
Personal Essay Part 2
When thinking about a personal essay a few topics came to mind but one really stuck out. It was my pregnancy for my youngest son. During that pregnancy I had all my routine tests done to make sure everything was going okay, until I was given the test to check for gestational diabetes. The doctor always said after every test that no news was good news, meaning if I didn’t receive a phone call everything was fine. But after that test it was different, the phone rang and on the caller id was my doctors office, I knew right away it was bad news. I was afraid to pick up so I let the phone ring and they left a message for me to call them back. I waited a day because I was afraid to hear the news. In the back of my mind I new it was my fault. I read all the pregnancy books and knew the causes for gestational diabetes. One of them is age, it’s common in older mothers, and another is obesity. I new which one pertained to me being that I was 25 years old- it was my weight. I was about seventy pounds overweight and had very poor, unhealthy eating habits and didn’t exercise. I called the office back the next day and she gave me the news that I was expecting, that I had developed gestational diabetes. Right away she informed me that I would have to attend a diabetes clinic at the hospital and be put on a very strict diet and would have to check my blood sugar levels after every meal. This really scared me; to have to draw my own blood. I was very upset and afraid after I hung up the phone. I remember immediately crying. All I could think about was how this might affect my unborn son and how it was my fault if anything was wrong with him when he was born. I thought of how unfair it was to him.
So I went a few days later to the diabetes clinic at the hospital. There were a few other women there and we received instructions for the diet we had to follow and how to use the blood sugar meters, which wasn’t fun. I remember leaving the hospital and thinking this was the worst day. All I could think about was the horrible diet I was on and how I would be hungry all the time, on top of the worrying about how this was affecting the baby. So before I left I was told to make an appointment with a nutritionist and to keep a food journal that I was suppose to bring back at my next appointment. During my first appointment with the nutritionist my husband went with me. The first thing she had me do was step on the scale, all I could remember is telling my husband not to look and for her not to say my weight out loud which was embarrassing to have to do. After looking over my food journal she had a talk with me. She told me the best thing for me to do was stick with the diabetes diet after my pregnancy. I’m thinking to myself “your crazy lady!” I’ve had enough of this I can’t wait to go back to my old eating habits then the next thing she said to me caught my attention. She told me if I continued with my old eating habits that I had a fifty percent chance of developing diabetes by the time I’m 50. At that moment something clicked. I started looking at this experience as a blessing because if I had continued with my old eating habit who knows how much heavier I would be right now, or worse the damage I would be doing to my body. So I continued with the diabetic diet and monitored my blood sugars and did everything I was supposed to do up until I gave birth and thank goodness my son was fine. I remember after I gave birth how I ordered my meals at the hospital. I made all healthy choices and I continued with the healthy food choices after leaving the hospital and started exercising and losing weight. To this day I’m a lot closer to what my weight is suppose to be, not the 70 pounds overweight that I was. I still have a little way to go but I’m a lot closer than I was five years ago. On the negative side I was afraid for my unborn sons health however, the whole experience made me change my life for the better.
