Of course, it being beach vacation week does mean that a rather momentous event is rapidly approaching: this coming Friday, Lime will turn five. Five! It is hard to believe. In addition to it being the half-decade mark for him, it is a big parenting milestone for us. We no longer have any preschoolers in the house. We have only "big kids."
Lime's little personality has continued to blossom through the pandemic. His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, a weird hodgepodge of stuff he picks up from us, the sitters, and YouTube. "Cytotoxic venom." "Supermassive black hole." "Tremendous size." He continues to be completely obsessed with Transformers, and knows every single character and all of its possible permutations with different armor and weapons and how the different individual transformers can combine to make other things. He's watched enough YouTube videos of people transforming their transformer toys that he can do a pretty effective imitation of the narration when he transforms his own toys. And, despite the fact that their relationship is not always peaceful, the first thing Lime does when he wakes up is to spring forth from bed and wake up his older brother so that the day's mischief can begin.
I feel like we are continuing to settle into this weird new lifestyle. I went to Costco this evening and noticed two things. First, that a spider had built a web connecting my steering wheel to the dashboard. Second, that buying a month's worth of supplies no longer felt like total siege preparation, but merely a "regular" grocery trip. As always, these days, it was a relief to get home with everything and know that I don't have to go back to a store again for several more weeks.
Other than that, it has been very hot and humid there the past week or so, which has made for not so great running weather but the garden is growing like gangbusters. Our pumpkin vine flowered, and the pole beans are starting to put out their first actual beans, the vines now being well over 7 feet long. I decided that I needed a little extra motivation to keep running in this weather, so I signed up for my first virtual event, a "run across Wisconsin," where you enter your mileage into a website every day and you have a fixed number of days to cover the distance between the northernmost
and southernmost points in the state. And if you do it, you get a T-shirt. I'm pretty doubtful that I will be doing any in-person racing for the next 6-12 months, so if this is a way to keep on track, I'll take it!
