Before the end of my pregnancy with Sam, Luke and I had a wide radius of places we’d adventure. Then my third trimester hit, and I was couch-ridden by the final stretch of it. Thanks to the same preeclampsia I had with Luke, my ankles were so inflated they resembled balloons on the verge of popping if I didn’t sit with them propped and elevated for most of the day. Finally, at pregnancy’s bitter end, bed rest became the doctor’s order. My blood pressure slowly crept into a danger zone until finally it spiked high enough to warrant induction, landing Sam in my arms three weeks ahead of nature’s schedule.
If families could show stretch marks the way bellies do, ours would have many, stripes like badges to show for our work through the growing pains of the difficult first months after Sam’s birth. Today, our baby boy is only three months shy of his first birthday, and I am finally (finally!) starting to feel like I have my groove back, or am beginning to have some new version of this groove. Though by no means the same groove, this is a more varied groove, and an even better groove, I think, better because there are scenes like this in it now
And this.
We still manage to make time for adventures of all sizes. I’ve also learned to seek big adventure in unlikely places, sometimes even within the smallest radius from home.
Lately winter has granted us a handful of spring previews, and the days seem to beg us out into them. Sam fits in the bike trailer now, a moment I’ve been anticipating since he was a mere fetus.
Here are two pictures from our maiden voyage with Luke on his bike, me on mine, and Sam in the trailer behind me.
We bike often,
maybe too often, if you ask Luke. He seemed to be trying to find a gentle way to break it to me the other day when I suggested a ride and he noted how we’d just been on a bike ride the day before.
“I know,” I said, defending my suggestion, “but it’s great exercise for both of us and it’s such a nice day. You mean you don’t want to go on a bike ride?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s like when you hear the same song over and over and over and you just get tired of it.”
It was his way of explaining how repetition can ruin even a good thing, I guess. Though impressed with his metaphor, I was disappointed by the sentiment behind it. I wanted to take another bike ride and I felt like whining about it. Finally, I convinced Luke to say yes to the ride if a park became our destination.
“Well, that’s different if we ride to a park,” he said, and agreed to the compromise.
One other day last week, I packed a warm dinner in Luke’s lunch box, loaded Sam up in the trailer, and off we zoomed to a bench just a few minutes from our front door. I called it our picnic dinner,
and even brought a bib and baby food for Sam. It was a nice change of pace from our usual routine, especially on a night Kevin works late and wouldn’t be home in time to join us anyway.
Capping our week of bike rides with the epitome of mama and sons adventure days, I decided on a whim last weekend to take the boys to the beach, one of the best quick decisions I’ve made in a long time. Luke had a blast in the freezing waves, running full speed in surf so calm it could have almost passed for lake water. Here are some of my favorite pictures from our afternoon at the beach.
Sam enjoyed the expanse of sand to really practice his newly perfected crawling speed.
Though he did sample a few fistfuls of the stuff, I was pleasantly surprised by how little of his surroundings Sam tried to eat. I only had to swipe blades of seaweed from his mouth twice! Below is another movie of some of my favorite moments from our day at the beach.
You know it’s a good day when Mama says yes to salt water taffy and a souvinier penny from the penny squishing machine at the end of it. I surprised even myself by agreeing to both on the way home.
I knew my groove was officially back the day we ventured to the beach and I’d managed to lug a beach chair, our bag of sand toys and giant polkadot bag of towels and food and dry clothes—not to mention our dog, Tiki, with is bad leash manners and poor social skills around fellow canines—to the beach on such short notice. Though it took about a year after I lay hugely pregnant, preeclamptic, and incapacitated on the couch most days, we have officially found our new normal and, the best part, I love it!
If there’s one thing this past year has taught me, it’s how much fun sticking close to home can be—sometimes even venturing no further than five minutes from our door. Yesterday, for example, we spent the morning in the parking lot of a vacant warehouse a few blocks from us with our dog and his ball, and Luke with his skateboard and soccer ball—all of which he’d toted there in the “trunk” of his Jeep on a beautiful sunny morning.
It was easy, perfect fun, and the perfect dose of it before we headed home in time for Sam’s nap.
Luke has also grown to appreciate the value in days we don’t even leave the house, and, in fact, sometimes even requests them! The other day I planned to take the boys to The Discovery Museum, but Luke insisted we stay home just as we were about to head out the door. He said he wanted to stay inside and play dominos instead.
“It’s such a nice day, Buddy!” I objected.
“Well, we can open the windows and then play dominos,” he said.
We ended up doing exactly this.
Although it’s good to know Luke has also grown to see the up sides of simple fun, I must say it’s nice to know, for my sake, we can also tackle the fun waiting for us further distances away on occasion, too.
As I reflect on this past nine months and the new grooves all the change has etched into our lives, sometimes I think about how my work load has doubled and time to myself feels simultaneously chopped in half. I try to squeeze in bits of “me time” in creative ways where and when I can. Thanks to this article, I’m beginning to feel less of a panic about the suffocating force of time as it whips by, turning days into months at week-speed, and leaving the household chores piled up on my to-list like the dirty dishes often are in the sink. The timing of finding Anne Lamott’s three year old pep talk couldn’t have been better. I’ve been aching for perspective like this for months!
Sam is growing as fast as he can crawl, and Luke is changing so much, and entirely too quickly. I know I’ll look back one day and barely remember how messy our living room stayed for days, or how long that drip of smoothie sat on the kitchen floor like an ink blot waiting to be named and psychoanalyzed. I know I will care, however, whether I maximized this magical, fleeting time with my two boys. I’ll care if I marked as much off of my want-to-do list as I could, and I’ll care if made time to write about as much of it as I was able to scrounge up the minutes for.
