Last season on "Jersey Shore," the tanned and terrific kids spent their downtime in Seaside Heights working at a T-shirt shop on the boardwalk. Now both [article id="1642182"]the Situation[/article] and [article id="1642019"]JWoww[/article] are launching their own clothing lines. Might any of the "Shore" crew get into the dessert business soon? Because on the hit reality show's second season, the cast goes to work at a gelato joint in Miami's South Beach. The place is called Lecca Lecca Gelato Caffé, and it's owned by a genial Italian-American man named Enzo Biondi, who shared some of his memories of toiling alongside Sitch, Snooki and the rest of their pals. "Vinny was very good in the morning," he told MTV News. "In the morning time, most of them were tired from partying in the nighttime. Ronnie was very good. Clean up and set up the terrace outside. In the nighttime, the manager was the Situation guy, Mike." The task of luring in bikini-clad customers for some tiramisu- or pistachio-flavored treats was left to none other than DJ Pauly D. "Pauly was the one bringing the girls from outside to inside," Biondi said.

Snooki — she of the diminutive stature and oversize poof — had a bit of trouble tackling the task at hand for a while. "Snooki, she was very funny, because actually she couldn't serve the gelato," he laughed. "She was a little small to get inside the display and serve the customer." Ever the enterprising businessman, Biondi provided Snickers with a step ladder that allowed her to reach into the display case and start scooping. Not that she always put her work duties above other priorities. "One time I found Snooki, she was sleeping under the counter," he said. Watch "Jersey Shore" Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on MTV. River Forest Local Sports Harris, Nelson help OPRF softball rally for dramatic state title EAST PEORIA, Ill. — The Oak Park-River Forest softball players and coaches were in no hurry to leave the field after winning the program's second state title.After 2 hours and 42 minutes and having been, at one point, one strike away from defeat, the Huskies had every reason to savor their 4-2 victory in 10 innings over Normal West on Saturday, June 11, in the Class 4A state championship game at EastSide Centre.

Sophomore shortstop Maeve Nelson, one of several OPRF heroes on the night, put the IHSA cardboard "Oak Park-River Forest" sign behind her head, with each arm supporting the massive sign while she walked off Diamond No. 2 for the final time into the first-base dugout.Chocolate Lab Puppies For Sale In NjA group of Huskies players danced in sync along the first-base line.White Curtains With Gold Polka Dots Along with numerous players, coach Mel Kolbusz was doused by a bucket of water by a pair of OPRF students while the team took a picture with the first-place trophy.Used Patio Furniture In Dallas TxHis shirt dripping with water, Kolbusz, celebrating career win No. 676, welcomed the cold relief following a taxing and hot weekend."

It feels awesome and this is a great feeling, and it's hot," Kolbusz said, smiling.The Huskies (37-2) finished the season with 27 straight wins to erase the memories from last season's third-place finish. Junior Chardonnay Harris (15-2) pitched 15 of the 17 innings at state, allowing six hits, no runs, striking out 22 and walking only four batters. Harris, an Auburn recruit, relieved senior Emily Richardson to pitch the final eight innings of Saturday's title game, outdueling Normal West's Reganne Camp, who had a 4A state finals record of 15 strikeouts in 10 innings."Chardonnay is a stud," Kolbusz said. "We battled and battled. I'm so proud of the kids. They believed in themselves all year. It's the nicest group of kids that I've ever coached. They are hard workers and terrific kids."OPRF trailed 2-0 through five innings. Caitlyn Santiago's RBI single put the Huskies on the board in the sixth, and Nelson's two-out triple on a 2-2 count in the seventh tied the game and forced extra innings."

When I got to third, I was almost crying," said Nelson, a Northwestern recruit. "It was so emotional."Three innings later, Nelson, a base-runner at second, helped teammate Fiona Girardot during the freshman's winning at-bat."She's so awesome hitting the inside pitch," Nelson said of Girardot. "I saw the catcher set up inside. We always try and call pitches for each other. I told her the pitch was coming inside. I knew she was going to turn on it. It was awesome to see."Girardot blasted a two-run double to left field in the top of the 10th, a hit that will always be remembered in OPRF softball history."The whole time I knew their pitcher was getting me with change-ups," Girardot said. "I just thought to focus on one pitch at a time. It was low fastball inside, and I just dropped by barrel to the ball. Once I hit it, I just knew it was a hit."Kolbusz said he couldn't help but notice the parallels to OPRF's previous state championship. In 2005, the Huskies scored three runs in the top of the 11th inning to beat Moline 4-1 in the Class AA title game."

I told the kids before that inning we scored those runs that in 2005 that it was almost the same exact scoreboard," Kolbusz said.The Huskies will lose some important pieces in their two-year state run, most notably Richardson, who went 20-0 this season and hit nine home runs. Other senior starters included leadoff hitter Sam Linde, third baseman Ellie Ziegler, left fielder Ireland Flannery and Santiago, who played first base.With Nelson, Harris and Girardot among the expected returning players, OPRF will have high expectations next season, as well."We're a very close team, and I just wanted to do it for the team and seniors," Harris said. "We all know we can come back here and will try and win it again."Bob Narang is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.Twitter @bobnarang © 2016, Chicago Tribune Illinois High School AssociationPhoto by Denis Libouton/iStockphoto/Thinkstock Last month, I discovered (and then nearly peed in my pants as a result of) comedian Jason Good’s blog post 46 Reasons My Three Year Old Might Be Freaking Out.

(The first three possibilities: His sock is on wrong. His lip tastes salty. His shirt has a tag on it.) After exchanging a few comments on Facebook about it with a friend, she privately messaged me, frustrated with and concerned about her 18-month-old. “It's like all of a sudden in the last three weeks, she's turned into this tantrum ball and I never know what's going to set her off,” she wrote. “I'm living with a baby land mine!”What is it with toddlers and losing their minds all the time? Is it normal that my son wails if his shirt sleeve isn’t all the way down, loves the bathtub one day but hates it the next, and manically screams “MINE!” two seconds after handing our dog a ball?And it’s not only normal, but reasonable. As five experts on child psychology recently explained to me, toddlers’ irrational behaviors are a totally understandable reflection of their inner turmoil and frustrations. In sum, their world is turning upside down and they don’t yet have the skills to handle it.

Tantrums don’t mean your kid is a spoiled brat or needs therapy; tantrums mean he is normal. The toddler life is not actually as cushy as it seems. Sure, I’d like 12 hours of sleep a night and all my meals prepared for me, thanks. But 2-year-olds are also going through a hellish personal crisis: They have just learned how to walk and use tools, so they really want to explore the world; at the same time, they are terrified of what that world contains and constantly fearful that their parents, whom they love and trust to a terrifying degree, will suddenly abandon them. Oh, and those same parents? They’re suddenly barking “no” all the time, seemingly just for fun. It’s no coincidence that kids start having tantrums around the time that parents start enforcing rules. When you say no, sweetie, you can’t have that butcher knife, your 20-month-old has no idea that you are depriving her of this awesomely shiny contraption for her own safety. “Since it’s the parent, whom they rely on for everything, who is taking it away, it’s perceived as a withdrawal of love, essentially,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor of Infant Mental Health at the University of California-San Francisco and author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler.

“They don’t know your reasoning. They just know that something they were getting great pleasure from, all of a sudden, you are taking away.” The pain that this causes, Lieberman says, is similar to what we might feel if our spouse betrays or cheats on us. As adults, we (usually) don’t (audibly) freak out when we don’t get what we want or when somebody makes us mad because we can talk ourselves down. We can identify and label the emotion we’re feeling, which, research suggests, goes a long way toward quelling and controlling it. Our ability to label feelings stems in part from our excellent language skills, which young toddlers don’t have yet. Also thanks to language, as adults we can confront the people who are upsetting us and suggest solutions. My 22-month-old, though now very adept at informing me of his need for milk, doesn’t manage complex negotiations so well. His first response to frustration is generally to grab the nearest object and throw it across the room, which makes sense considering that his gross motor skills are among his strongest assets.

If the only tool you have is an arm, you tend to see every problem as a potential projectile. Another reality of the toddler brain: The frontal lobe, which is responsible for planning, logic, reasoning, working memory and self-control, is vastly underdeveloped. Because of this, “toddlers are really living in the moment, not thinking about consequences,” explains developmental psychologist Nancy McElwain, who runs the Children’s Social Development Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There’s no voice in their head saying, hmm, maybe it’s not a good idea to throw my lovie in the toilet (too bad, because lovie got very wet in our house last week). A semifunctional frontal lobe also means that toddlers have practically no sense of time and patience and therefore “experience wanting as needing,” Lieberman says—i.e., when they want a chicken nugget, they really, really need it NOW! They can also have a skewed sense of cause-and-effect, developing a paralyzing fear of the bathtub because what if they go down the drain, too?

Finally, let’s not forget the importance of experience when it comes to handling challenges appropriately, says developmental psychologist Claire Kopp, co-author of Socioemotional Development in the Toddler Years. The 2-year-old, she says, simply doesn’t have any experiences to draw from. If it sounds like I’m characterizing your beautiful, special, way-above-average toddler as animal-like, that’s because I am. Pediatrician Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block and The Happiest Toddler on the Block, calls toddlers “little cavemen.” “That is not meant to be derogatory, but meant to set the frame of reference for parents,” he explained to me. “It takes years to socialize our little toddlers, so it’s important for parents to cut themselves some slack. Don’t feel you’re a terrible parent because they smeared jam all over the walls.” (This is not to say that toddlers don’t also love organization and routine; they do. My son lines his toy cars up in a row every day, probably because he’s trying to build some order into his chaotic, confusing life.

And his sleeve-down requirements may stem from a desire for consistency.) The caveman analogy helps to explain yet another issue plaguing toddlers, Karp says: They are very understimulated. Little cavemen (and here I’m talking about the real ones) spent their days very differently than kids do today. “It was a sensory-rich environment: smells, the fresh air, shadows, birds, grass under your feet. Today, we put our little kids in houses and apartments with flat floors, flat walls, ceilings, and not too many chickens, and we think that’s normal,” Karp explains. “It is hard to spend all day with a 2-year-old, and they don’t really want to spend all day with you anyway.” Given all this, is it really that surprising that tantrums happen as frequently as they do? There are certainly good and bad ways for parents to handle poor behavior (an issue for another column), but the existence of tantrums, and the tendency for toddlers to tackle their woes through screaming and hitting and throwing, is perfectly normal because it’s sometimes “the toddler’s only recourse,” says Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.