As you likely know, Heather is a lifelong Los Angeles Dodgers fan and I am a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan. This complicates things when it comes to our kids because no one (and I stress NO ONE) can be a fan of both teams. To remedy this, Heather and I decided that on our kids’ eighth birthdays…THEY MUST CHOOSE.

Annie, of course, is now seven, so the urgency to win over her allegiance is strong — especially since the final baseball season before her 8th birthday just started. Our campaigns to sway Annie will likely continue all season, but I was able to launch an early offensive thanks to our trip to visit my parents. You see, last night we went to the Giants game and I made sure to pull out all the stops.

AT&T Park, home of the Giants, has a number of kid-friendly features, so we went early to check them out. If you’ve ever seen a game played at AT&T Park on TV, you’ve probably noticed the giant Coke bottle behind the left field fence. Well, inside of that Coke bottle is a slide for kids to go down! Annie had a blast going down it, and so did James who is obsessed with slides of all kinds (literally — his favorite thing to watch on YouTube Kids is videos of people on waterslides), and hey, it’s never too early to start working on James’ allegiance.

Unfortunately, what I was hoping would be the pièce de résistance — a mini-baseball stadium next to the Coke bottle where kids could hit home runs and run the bases — was no longer there! The area had been cleared out and — boo — replaced by a car on display (probably a sponsored deal to help pay for the new 62 million dollar reliever The Giants signed over the off-season, lol). Thankfully, there WAS a stand for San Francisco’s legendary Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, and I was able to win more points by getting the kids ice cream cones and hot chocolate.

Soon we took our seats and they had a great view of the field (Thanks, dad).

“Mwahahahahaha!” I thought. “With seats like this Annie is sure to turn to the Giants!”

But — if Annie DOES become a Giants fan — it will because of what happened next. In the bottom of the first inning an announcement came over the loudspeaker that went something like this: “Hello, fans! If you tag a photo #ATTPark and put it on Instagram or Twitter, it might end up on the Jumbotron later in the game!”

Annie immediately turned to me, excited. “Dad! Can we take a picture so it can get up on the screen?”

“Sure,” I replied. “But there a lot of people here. Something like 50,000! So try not to be too disappointed if we don’t end up on the Jumbotron, okay?”

She said, “Okay, Dad!” or the like, and we snapped this photo (which I uploaded to Instagram):

Well, I’d forgotten all about it when, around the seventh inning, I glanced at the Jumbotron and saw this:

“Look, Annie! Look!”

Annie looked up to see our photo and immediately broke out into a huge smile. Heather, meanwhile, quickly snapped a photo of it.

On top of all this fun, the Giants won, 6-1. The battle may be early, but I think I (and The Giants) clearly won round one. Your move, Heather.