I have always been a big baseball fan. I played it in high school, and while I might not have been the best player, it didn’t keep me from loving the game.

My dad was also a baseball fan. His love of the game was what he passed down to me. I always enjoyed going to the ball park with him while he taught me the different idiosyncrasies of the game.

When I learned that I was having a son, I knew that I wanted to pass down to him the love of baseball that my dad passed on to me. We took him to his first game when he was six months old, and he loved it. He was not speaking then, but you could tell he was intrigued. He had seen me watch baseball on TV, but seeing it in person? Completely different.

Read more: How to Pass Down a Love of Baseball

On our way down to Chelsea Market to take a pasta-making class at Giovanni Rana Pastificio & Cucina, I suggested to my kids that the quality of the class would depend entirely on the instructor or as I elegantly put it, “If the teacher sucks, the class will suck.” As my children have been students for most of their lives, this was not breaking news to them.

Well, the teacher didn’t suck, and raising the bar yet higher, Antonella Rana knows how to captivate her students. During the hour-long class, as we made dough from scratch and later cut and filled two kinds of ravioli, I could see my kids’ personalities coming through as they lost themselves in their pasta making.

Read more: Making a Connection (and Pasta) with Your Kids

First a bit of background – two weeks ago I was in Charlotte, NC; from there I traveled to Madrid, Spain, for five days; and then I was home for the weekend before traveling from Oregon to Florida on April 22, the dreaded F-A-Armageddon.  For three days, I heard warning: “There are going to be flight delays across the country because of the sequester and the FAA furloughs.” 

I am of the crowd that opted for the view that – just like the sequester – things wouldn’t be as bad as people said they’d be, and this was an insult to the flying public. I just love being held hostage by my own government, don’t you?

Read more: No Impact of FAA Sequester Budget Cuts