Lazy days

My list of things to accomplish before summer ends is growing. The time in which I have to accomplish these tasks is diminishing. I suppose this makes me a world class procrastinator. When I'm thinking more positively, I tell myself I am using my time to fulfill my top priority for the summer: getting exercise. I have done and seen many beautiful things this summer under the guise of "getting exercise". Uptown, downtown, nature, urban, I am logging hundreds of pedestrian miles exploring Chicago's beautiful terrain. In fact, I am hoping to visit historic Oak Park, famous for its numerous Frank Lloyd Wright homes and Ernest Hemingway's birthplace with my family at some point.

Who would rather go into work and organize athletic equipment, spend hours on the phone with useless customer service people, or, I shudder to think, research phone and internet service providers, than spend the day exploring the Field museum? Under the guise of working out, my friend (and awesome babysitter) and I went to the museum for our morning constitutional. We visited exhibits on native peoples, and wondered about the parallel development of the indigenous populations in the Americas, and the development of our own people in the Middle East at the same time.

Neither of us being historians of the periods or populations, all we could do was speculate. While our American antecedents were chasing buffalo, our Jewish ancestors were receiving the Torah, as best we could figure. It was an odd contrast to consider. The focus on daily survival versus an intense spiritual awakening. Not that the Native Americans lacked in a spiritual existence. On the contrary, they perceived the entire natural world as suffused in spirits and mystery. But meanwhile, Grandpa Moses was reading us the letter of The Law. No buffalo roaming, no communal hunts, our desert ancestors seemed to have skipped the whole cave painting business and went straight to a theological masterpiece.

We continue to leave the hunting and gathering to the professionals.

Three or four thousand years later, I'm neither hunting and gathering nor writing a masterpiece. I'm pounding the pavement in hopes of shedding a few pounds, and in an attempt to make peace with a city that can be both beautiful and belligerent. Chicago in the summer is a gem, an uncommon delight. I have to take it all in before I bunker down and hibernate amidst my own little cave painters in anticipation of a winter that is coming too fast.

After native lands, we visited the African exhibit and paid our respects to an Egyptian mummy. The Egyptian exhibit is extraordinary. But all of the walking around exhibits didn't exactly cause us to work up a sweat, so we went outside to tour the Museum campus, passing the Shedd aquarium, zipping around the Adler planetarium, and heading back for the parking garage under Soldier Field Stadium. It was a perfect day for an aerobic stroll.

While my daily walks have been enlightening and interesting, the highlight of the summer has been watching my children blossom and grow. My son astounded us all this week in the pool when he finally let go of the wall and swam.

For five years I had both patiently and impatiently waited for this moment. I didn't have to imagine how he felt. My son emerged from the pool with the biggest grin I had ever seen on his pixie face. He had overcome his greatest challenge in life. He faced down his greatest fear. My son swam the front crawl and the backstroke, too!

I had teased him that as a result of all of his practice with arm circles and bubbles and breaths, he would completely skip the awkward "doggie paddle" stage, and go straight to the Olympic caliber stage. I was half right. His backstroke is sublime.

It's one thing I can finally check off my parental list of things to do, but we'll keep plugging away at those swim lessons. I still have two little girls who need to find their inner fishies, and it's never too late to start my son training for the 2020 Olympic games. I bet Mark Spitz was a late bloomer, too.

My diva is also coming along in swimming. What she lacks in coordination, she makes up for in enthusiasm. I've enrolled them in another two week session with the hopes that that will do the trick for her. The baby will have to wait another year before I unleash her on the poor teenage swim teachers.

That little one is having a great summer. She's had pony rides, a visit from a firefighter, a police officer, and a librarian at her daycare. She plays outside for hours, splashing around in the "waterplay area", and at home terrorizes her siblings and mother with glee.

Yesterday I had to dislodge a large bead from her left nostril. My brother-in-law famously had to be taken to the emergency room to have a Lego head removed from his nose when he was a child. Far from being a traumatic experience, it seems to have led him to his current profession: Ear-Nose-Throat doctor. I had been spared the whole shove-small-foreign-objects-up-the-nose phenomenon with my older two. It didn't surprise me when big sister came screaming down the hall alerting me to her sibling's latest round of mischief. Fortunately I was able to extract the one inch long football shaped bead with the help of tweezers and big brother holding her down.

Apart from the bead incident, summer's going, er, swimmingly. The kids and I are enjoying the weather and the relaxed schedules to the fullest. Our only complaint is that it's going way too fast.

And my list of things to accomplish is not getting any shorter.