Pascale LeBrasseur

Yesterday afternoon was magical!

It was magical for Emily, for her team mates from the Field of Dreams, for all the parents standing there and taking pictures and making videos, for the volunteers, for the Hub City Brewers and for the Blue Jays organization and former players!

Yesterday was something money can’t buy for our kids with various ability levels.

Look at this video of Emily!

http://youtu.be/UyDdPl_QgLA

If you are new to my blog, you are probably thinking that Emily is a pretty poor baseball player.

🙂

That’s ok! I get it….

The guy pitching was close to her, he pretty much gave her the ball before she kinda ran to first base…

Allow me to help you see the magic in that short video.

Emily was diagnosed with Cri du chat syndrome in October 1999 when she was 15 months old.

At the time, we were told (amongst other things) that she would never walk, understand us, recognize us, communicate with us, her brain & body would never function properly.

Now… remember that video!

She is exactly where she needs to be, standing on her own, swinging that bat around to warm-up, keeping her eyes on the pitcher and on the ball. Her eyes are telling her brain that the ball is coming and her brain is telling her arms and hands to move at the exact time required to hit that ball. Once she’s made contact with the ball, she puts the bat down and runs to first base. At first base, she high fives…. Roberto Alomar!

Who’s Roberto Alomar? Come on… really? You don’t know???

Here’s his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Alomar

So… now that you know all the things Emily would never do and that not only she’s awesome on that video, she’s also playing baseball with former Blue Jays player and Hall of Famer Robbie Alomar….

Let me ask you again, how is that video?

I admit that my voice is annoying but overall that video is amazing!!!

The afternoon was beyond anything I could have imagined.

Look at Emily’s team!

Look at those smiles!

We made first page of the local newspaper

I wished the newspaper would still let you read it on-line for free, I would have love to give you the link to the article because it’s great. They talk about the Blue Jays players but they mostly talk about our players.

See these guys with Emily?

She was chatting with them while the “Blue” were at the bat!

The guy on the left is Sandy Alomar Sr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Alomar,_Sr.

Later on when he was signing Emily’s new Blue Jays t-shirt, I asked him what they were talking about earlier…

Turns out Emily was telling him about hockey and Justin Bieber….

LOL…. she talked to a former MLB player about her favorite sport to watch….. Hockey!!!

How awesome is that? Talk about full honesty, no pretenses, no BS… just 100% Emily truth.

In the newspaper article, they mentioned how one of our player asked Duane Ward if he plays Super Mario. 🙂 The guy won 2 world series but our player wanted to talk about video games … and apparently, Duane is not really good at video games.

3 years ago, Emily lasted 15 to 20 minutes a week at baseball than wanted to go home, Now she stays for the hour and a half. She gets there, says hi to Lexie, Jacob, Pascale, Taylor and so many more… She gives Brent a hug, says hello to Pat (the field of dream pitcher) than look for Mikey. He’s number 7 for the Hub City Brewers and he is Emily’s favorite guy. Not sure why she picked him… but over the last 3 years, that guy has allowed her to talk about Justin Bieber as much as she wants. He is helping her learn to catch the ball… that’s a work in progress and he is not giving up. In previous years, when Mikey was not there, Emily used to be completely lost but now she can go see another player and manages just fine.

When people look at our kids they see their differences, they see their disabilities.

Yesterday on that baseball field, I only saw abilities…. abilities of various levels. Everybody at the same level, it’s easy when the game is just a game. Everybody went to bat and went around all the bases. Nobody counted points, not because they are all winners but because it was a game! It was fun!

Grey or Blue team didn’t matter, they all cheered for each other, they all high fived each other, they all laughed and ran and played!

Yesterday was the kind of day you can’t buy for our kids, this is the kind of day that happens only when a group of amazing people get together and believe in a common cause…

…..

Thank you to all that made that day possible!

Yesterday, Emily’s baseball team was invited to participate in a 90 minutes baseball game with some former Blue Jays that were in town as part of Blue Jays Honda Super camp

http://toronto.bluejays.mlb.com/tor/baseball_academy/honda_super_camps_en.jsp

Emily’s field of Dreams team exist because of the Hub City Brewers, their wifes and girlfriends, their friends and some other great volunteers…

Those guys, all have jobs, they train with their team, they play games from Spring to Fall and spend 1.5 hour per week with our kids, playing baseball. Making each and every single one of them feel like a pro baseball player.

http://www.hubcitybrewers.com/field/

The opportunity to play with the Blue Jays was made possible by an alignment of stars and the contribution of not only the Blue Jays and the Hub City Brewers but also the involvement of Baseball Canada’s challenger program.

http://www.baseball.ca/eng_doc.cfm?DocID=521

Thank you to all of you!

Day 1 was all about flying to NYC and the American Girl place.

After our afternoon tea at the American Girl place, we returned to our hotel for the night. I admit that I was asleep by 5:30pm and I don’t know when Emily and Jon went to sleep.

Day 2 started around 6am. We were all well rested and ready to discover this part of the city before moving to our hotel for the next 4 nights.

My dream was to stay at The Plaza while in NYC but they were full on Saturday so we booked a hotel near the American Girl Place. The Barclay. It’s a nice hotel, the staff was ok for the little we interacted with them and the room was really small but the bed was comfortable :).

We got up, showered and got dress. I packed our clothes and things again, adding the new doll and clothes to our suitcases. By 7ish we were walking on Lexington in search of a place to grab breakfast. We found a café metro and went in for breakfast.

Their 3 eggs omelet can feed 2. I wasted food which I try not to do normally but I truly didn’t see it coming.

This is Emily waiting for breakfast.

After a delicious breakfast we decided to keep walking.

We didn’t bring a map, we just walked for a while. We saw the Chrysler building and stumble upon Grand Central Station! How lucky. This was on Emily’s list as it was featured in Madagascar..

We found the whispering tunnel. Emily and Jon tried it while I took pictures. It was really cute to see them facing the corners like kids that were in trouble.
🙂

After the train station, we went back to our hotel, grabbed our suitcases and asked the bellman to get us a cab to the Plaza.

I’m like a kid in a candy store when I get to experience a hotel I’ve heard so much of. My original plan was to have a chauffeur pick us up at the airport on Saturday with an Emily sign, that way we would arrived in style at the hotel but as we couldn’t get in Saturday, I didn’t bother with the chauffeur. We arrived in a yellow NYC cab!

We had a large room with tons of space and a huge bathroom, with an amazing shower and super large tub. Marble and gold everywhere.

Some people might not be fan of this type of hotel but I was in paradise. I admit that my husband’s tattoos and my lack of desire to dress-up on vacations made us look a little out of place but I couldn’t care less. Emily did look in her element there. Just the right amount of movie star qualities in her!

Once we settled in, we went to FAO Schwartz and the “open 24 hours a day” Apple store.

There was a lot of apple geniuses (…) in there….

As we were next to Central Park and their zoo was on Emily’s list… This is where we went next.

Central Park is really beautiful. We will have to return to NYC one day to explore it more!

As for the zoo, its small so in my humble opinion, it was overpriced but Emily wanted to see the penguins (from Madagascar) so we did. It’s a good thing she wasn’t looking for the lion or zebra cause they are not there….

The one cool thing about the zoo? This picture below. We saw that in the movie which is not the entrance to the zoo but it didn’t matter, it made Emily happy.

When Emily is happy, we are all happy!

The Zootique (cute name for gift shop) saw the first tears of our trip. Emily wanted a stuff toy and we said no. She has too many and already bought a doll the previous day so she could get something but not a stuffed toy.

She cried, her quiet cry that almost made me changed my mind… But I didn’t. She told me about her big tiger that was destroyed in the flood we had 3 or 4 years ago…. The memory on that kid is just incredible…. And painful!

After tons of discussions, tears and partial stare from the staff of the Zootique, we left empty handed and walked back to our hotel.

By than, it was almost dinner time and all we had eaten that day was a huge breakfast and a pretzel at the zoo.

We decided to grab dinner at the food court under the Plaza… :). Food court!!! Well the mall here as a food court, under the Plaza is a whole other level of food court!

You can find fancy everything down there!

We ended-up sitting down at Todd English for dinner. We shared appetizers – a Squid dish and artichoke filled with crab and other things. Main course was Lobster Mac & Cheese for Emily and burgers for us. I love that I can pick how I want my burger cooked in the US… Here it’s always well done and most restaurant confuse well done with burned….

Our burgers were amazing, all of our food was delicious. My sangria was made with sparkling something in it which I should have known if I had read the menu properly…. I didn’t care for it and didn’t finish my glass… What a waste! Well from now on I will read the drink menu the same way I read the food menu.

We were sitting at a table for 8 and another family sat with us. They had a boy approximately Emily’s age and by the end of dinner we were chatting a little. They were NewYorkers and had input on what we should do while in NYC.

We talked for a bit than Emily and the cute boy talked about Broadway shows and museum….

Did you read that?

In a big city, at a fancy restaurant, my daughter chatted with some boy about shows and museums…. 😊

Once they left I told Emily how proud of her I was for talking to that boy and staying in reality, not talking about her pretend world. She replied that he was cute and that she was “totally flirting” with him…. 😳

That was so awesome because she totally did!!!

Back in our room, Emily got a special delivery from Eloise (you know the little girl who lives in the Plaza… If you don’t know google her!)