☀️ Summer in the PNW
It's summer in the PNW and I'm living my best life right now. Big life updates — a new job, a wedding, a move to a new city, a birth — are exciting because they represent progress towards paradise but actually living in paradise is a series of small moments to be savored while I have it.
Our little froggy continues his debut into the world. The things we take for granted are source of endless wonder for him. We get a chance to relive life vicariously.
Froggy has recently discovered he has hands and his favorite activity in the whole world is munching on them. Sometimes he misplaces his little fingers and bursts out crying when he can't find them. The other adults rush to provide him a pacifier but I insist he finds his own hands and guide them back to his mouth. My heart is moved by his cries but we must set him for for life of age appropriate agency. 🐯I feel great pride and share in his happiness when he does successfully jam his fingers back into his mouth.
🥁My parents have concluded my failure as a musician and a dancer is was due to insufficient exposure to music with beats in my youth. To save froggy from this fate, they have put him on 2x a day Chinese rap music listening regime (Phoenix Legend is the go to)
He is capable of baby conversations - if you talk to him, he will say goo, goo back at you. He also smiles when he sees people he recognizes. Currently, he smiles biggest for AnMa (aka Grandma) but the rest of the family has caught on and are hard at work currying favor. AnMa was clever and volunteered for all of Froggy's favorite activities such as bath time which is how we think she got so far ahead. 🛁 The current pecking order in the household - Grandma, Daddy, and me and Grandpa tied in last place…
He's learned to use his first toy! Froggy hasn't engaged with any of the toys we've offered him except a wooden spinney toy for his bouncer from our friends Kelly and Alex. Day 1 he looked at it suspiciously and wouldn't even touch it. Day 2 he started grabbing it and smacking it. By day 3, he figured out he could spin the parts and smacks them when he's bored in his bouncer (in fact he's smacking them while I sneak off to write this)
In my personal life:
My strawberries are incredibly productive. I get a whole pint every day or so and we eat them fresh and turn the leftovers into ice cream. My secret is that I dump our daily coffee grounds into their bed. I fight my daily battles with the rabbits and wage a weekly war against the Japanese knotweed [0] threatening to invade from the east.
⛳ Indoor winter hobbies have been swapped out for summer hobbies. I'm back on the paddleboarding life and added golf to the rotation. My parents are here subsidizing my hot mom summer aka they take Froggy when I golf in the morning and paddle in the evening. I've been ferociously golfing as JP work's so I can get ahead and finally have a sport I'm better at. AHAHAH, despite all my hard work on the driving range - JP hits the balls much farther. I asked my golf coach what I needed to do to be able to hit further than JP and his reply was: You should compare your progress against yourself... 😣
Spanish continues to trot along one Duolingo lesson at a time - ROI is excellent for something I do 20min a day in the morning but I think I need to move to 1:1 tutoring. I've ended up inverse illiterate - I can read a surprisingly large amount of Spanish but can barely string together spoken sentences. Rather surreal experience when I told my landscaper I was learning Spanish, totally understood what he said in Spanish, and couldn't eek out any sensical words. The only things that were coming to mind were nonsenicial practice sentences "las vacas limpian la cocina" ( the cows are cleaning the kitchen)
The other day I woke up from a nap and thought, at the end of my life, if I could go back to any moment to relive, maybe it would be this very banal moment. JP playing League of Legends in the living room. My parents were holding our froggy up up Simba style telling him that when he turns 21, all the wine in the our wine fridge would be his [1] . All of us basking in the feeling of community and abundance.
[0] Japanese knotweed is afaik the most invasive plant in the world. It regrows from any part with roots that go 3-10ft down. I am the Lord Commander of the garden watch staring down the plant Night King...The eastern neighbor's yard has completely fallen to the knotweed invasion. She does a full chemical spray that turns her entire yard to a brown crisp. I inject pure concentrated roundup into any stragglers that make it over to my side of the fence. Alas, they completely regrow in just two weeks and we are told they may finally go away if we diligently continue our efforts for the next 5 years.
[1] Fat chance, I'm going to throw a huge party the night before his 21st birthday and he can watch us oldies chug it all down while while he sips grape juice.