Luge Scholarships?

The other day, Katie and I met with a financial planner. Not a whole lot to report here, other than sending our children to college in the future will cost eleventy billion dollars.

Plus room and board.

(Fortunately, future college won’t have $500/semester bills to drop at the bookstore, since I’m pretty sure that when Clara enters college in 2026 books won’t exist. So that’s a nice discount. However, downloading Principles of Modern Accounting, 32nd Edition will take forever to download onto her iPod. But then again, in future college you can train your iPod to take exams for you, so it’s a push. I’m sorry; what were we talking about again?)

While that price tag for higher education may seem rather daunting, there are alternatives. At Division I schools, admissions boards often choose to offer a full payment of a child’s four years of college in return for their display of superior athletic ability. Some may call them a pipe dream. I call them scholarships.

After all, what’s so impossible about Clara getting an athletic scholarship to the university of her choice? Both of her parents enjoyed mild success in an array of high school sports (read: anything but basketball), and even the ones that her father didn’t play, cafeteria workers often confuse his size for experience in football. On one side of the gene pool, she’s inheriting a dazzling collection of swim strokes with a bump-set-spike mentality. On the end, an inclination to kick balls with one’s feet, hit them with one’s bat, and run very quickly over equally-spaced mini-barriers.

The following are a list of things that Clara has done to date that have gotten our hopes up for free college-by-means-of-athletics.

SWIMMING! - I know what you’re thinking; the primary purpose of giving a baby a bath is to provide a cleaning service to someone who lacks the motor skills to do it themselves. Clara enjoys baths – she’s far from the stereotypical screamfest that so many babies are made out to be when Johnson and Johnson are in attendance. It’s not a bad life – you lie on your back in a hard plastic tub with a soft fabric hammock stretched over the dirty bathwater. Other than calmly lying there waiting for the next rinse of warm water to be poured, the only real movement Clara will make is a spasm of the arms, going up and down. Some might think it’s because she’s cold and wants to go faster. I know better. She wants to learn to backstroke, and go so fast she breaks every high school record there is.

SOCCER! – My favorite position to carry the baby around the apartment is her sitting in my hands and leaning her against my chest. Pretty much she sits there like she’s in an airplane seat, enjoying the view as I walk endlessly around the same 1,045 square feet she’s accustomed to. However, I know a training opportunity when I see it. You know those cords that hang down from Venetian blinds? They provide the equipment for Clara’s World Cup training ground. With her feet, she’ll kick the knobs on the cords’ ends back and forth, not unlike juggling a soccer ball. In no time, she’ll be able to do this. This method, of course, is not without a proven track record. After all, the origin of Venetian Blinds? Italy, your 2006 World Cup Champions.

LUGE! – Ok, so it may not qualify as a sport using some people’s definitions, but the mere idea of sliding on one’s back down a frozen sheet of ice at over 80 mph statisfies my base parameters. Our little one, despite having never heard of or seen this Winter Olympic sport, has already entered training. You remember that bouncer chair we mentioned a few weeks back that has instilled a hatred of monkeys in our daughter? As of late, she’s been using it as a luge training complex. Despite the inability to walk or crawl, that’s no longer keeping her from becoming mobile. This morning, in order to get her mom’s attention, she found a way to slide out from under the baby birdie battering cage and onto the surface of the bed. Now I understand that the bouncer chair isn’t exactly Stalag 17, but her jailbreak has got her parents on high alert. I wonder if Carter’s sells a one piece baby spandex luge suit…

She’s feeling the rhythm. And perhaps also the rhyme.