The days have been getting longer and longer. I am so grateful that Jason's first semester of his MBA began in the summer - it doesn't feel as lonely waiting for him at night when the sky is still pink and the sun still slowly setting at 8:30pm.
Lately, Monday and Wednesday evenings Will and I take it pretty easy. We wait to have our leisurely jog until the Carolina summer heat has relented, about 5:30pm.
Will is always exceedingly conscientious about stretching.
Jason relaxed about my long runs on the road when I bought this neon Champion top at Target:
He lovingly refers to me as his running traffic sign.
If we run in the evenings, we stay close to home and just loop through our neighborhood. I love seeing the way the whole place has come to life. We moved here at the end of last autumn, you know, and so the trees were already shedding for winter, and everything was mostly brown and grey, though I welcomed it with giddy delight and Pumpkin Spice candles. Now, the whole neighborhood is a rich, layered green. I'm so pleased by the number of people who keep their yards tidy and lovely. It seems that we are not the only young family to move into this old neighborhood with great expectations of sprucing things up for our children. The pool and park are alive in the evenings now with happy laughs, smoking grills, young children, and best of all, fireflies.
If the run is particularly long and gruesome, Will takes great enjoyment in livening things up a bit by pretending he desperately needs to drink and then waiting until I'm huffing and puffing up a big hill before tossing the sippy-cup overboard.
That imperious toss of things he is finished with caused Jason and I, very early on, to refer to the situation as a "firing".
Mr Baby routinely "fires" the stuff toys in his crib for daring to comfort him at naptime; his grilled cheese for impudently sticking around when he is *clearly* full; books that have ceased to come up with new ideas; and, as mentioned, sippy cups that become lukewarm on a long run.
Let me tell you - it is agony to bend over mid-hill, red-faced and asthmatic, while firmly controlling the stroller and desperately keeping my feet in a running cadence (because if I stop I will surely die) to clutch that rolling, fired sippy cup.
But I am still that sucker mom who worries if its been 40 minutes since his last sip of water sooo I have simply resigned myself to my fate.
Running in the evenings has been so much more relaxing than mid-90-afternoons. I got to come home to this view overhead in my front yard:
I sat next to the stroller on the front step and cooled down under that beautiful canopy and watched the fireflies come out.
I so love these summer evenings.
Labels: family, husband, MBA, run, runner, running, something beautiful