I need to cancel my column this week. Our family has been really busy with basketball, ballet, a bout of some sort of barfing flu, and the grass is growing again.

A few weekends ago, our kids performed in the Blue Heron’s spring ballet, “Romeo and Juliet and Original Works.” More than 100 ballet students ages 3 to 18 danced in the three-hour show staged in the high school theater. After weeks of rehearsal, our dancers had evening performances Friday through Sunday, as well as matinees each afternoon.

In the chaotic green room between shows, moms with hairpins clenched in their teeth brushed out tangled hair-sprayed braids and painted pursed lips hussy red. Clutches of twittering grade-school girls in pink or blue leotards and pink tights fluttered about. Boys in black tights and white shirts clustered around one kid slouched in a high-backed chair playing Plants versus Zombies on an iPad.

Distracted parents handed off gym bags stuffed with tights, toe shoes and PB-and-J for their kids camping in the green room as if supporting riders in the Tour de France. Sometimes they tarried a few moments to shout in tight twos or threes with other ballet moms who’d volunteered to maintain order backstage.

We stood around a Formica-topped schoolroom desk in the swirling cacophony cramming ham sandwiches and bagels and cream cheese in our mouths, watching ourselves chew in the giant mirror that runs the entire length of the south wall.

Onstage, wide-eyed toddlers in pudgy-pink leotards frolicked like spring lambs on a brightly-lit set for hundreds of friends and neighbors, plump fingers propped on hips, curtseying modestly while giggling in ragged lines. More experienced dancers, lithe and graceful, seemingly floated on air in elaborate choreography as if formed from nothing but billowing silk and a breeze.

One toddler forgot to run offstage after her bow and stood alone, shy and blinking in the hot lights, fingers entwined under her chin as the audience tittered. An older dancer ran out from the wings and yanked her offstage to spattering applause.

Another reason I need to cancel my column this week is that last month our family spent an entire weekend in Yakima at a basketball tournament. Seven sixth-grade island athletes played five similar teams from across the state, in a pair of gleaming-new grade-school gyms seemingly plopped pre-fab onto the hop fields on the outskirts of Yakima.

I read in the local paper that our hotel was near the center of a recent prostitution abatement action. It was a comfort to learn that the neighborhood was really turning around now that the dope houses had been shut down for a couple of weeks.

Relegated to sycophants in our eldest son’s entourage, my wife Maria and I dozed fitfully in the queen bed, trying not to think about who might have occupied the bed before us. We shoe-horned three kids into the other queen, while our preening athlete, clearly not happy to be spending his free hours with his little brother and sisters, pointedly ignored us and made a gorilla nest on the carpet.

Our prostitute-free hotel had a small indoor pool in a tile-lined room off of the lobby. In the afternoons, our team of sixth-graders floated aimlessly on blow-up pool toys like indolent rock stars, braying vulgarities at one another. Their echoed shouts blurred into a single howl like half-a-dozen blue heelers tracking an escaped convict up an office-building stairwell.

When I was in sixth grade, we idly shot baskets during recess with a red rubber kickball. Some of my sporty friends turned out for youth basketball and were regularly creamed by the CAYA teams, who had spiffy orange uniforms, menacing cheerleaders who could mess you up, and ran actual plays.

At this tournament, the skill level of the teams was remarkably high. Some of those kids played like scale-model Globetrotters.

Another reason I need to cancel my column this week is that our front lawn was nearly two feet high before I spent a lonely, brooding, Captain-Ahab-style weekend hacking it flat using a lunging, butterfly-stroke technique with a battered lawnmower.

The motor hangs by a single bolt; it starts after exactly five strong pulls, or not at all when the sun is shining. We planned a trip to town to shop for a new mower, but our oldest son developed infectious gastroenteritis, then we discovered that three kids had head lice. Again. So we cancelled that too.

Thanks for your patience. We’re all really sorry.

— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria live near Portage with their four children.