Adventure is out there!

As a parent, you experience every summer in a whole new way. Two summers ago, I was hugely pregnant. I was either laying on the beach like an actual whale or walking on the elliptical at the gym for a whole hour at a time because at least the gym was well air-conditioned and I could watch the London Olympics nonstop.

Then Eli was born. While we were in the hospital, thunderstorms came and the city cooled off. The first time I felt cold in the hospital after Eli's birth, I literally wept with relief. I hadn't felt cold for so long, and it felt amazing.

Last summer, Eli turned 1. He was a late crawler, so he was newly mobile. It felt incredibly strange to bring him to playgrounds where I had once plopped him on blankets to lay immobile on his back, occasionally flipping over onto his tummy. Suddenly he was crawling off on his own. There was grass! Dirt to smear over his hands and stick in his mouth!

As this past cold, icy winter crawled toward spring, Phil and I were discussing how potentially awesome the coming summer could be. With Eli running around on his own, we could frolic at Citi Field and at Coney Island; we could hit all the zoos and overdose on playground time. Best of all, I get Fridays off.

I'll be training for the marathon in November, so I was telling Phil about how I was thinking of bringing Eli to daycare on Fridays and doing my long runs then.

"Well," I said, "It makes no sense for me to pick him up before naptime if he's just going to nap, so I figured, why not let him nap there, and I'll just pick him up when naptime is over, around 2, and this way I can do some errands on Friday mornings too, like the laundry and grocery shopping. What do you think?"

I expected Phil to endorse my plan wholeheartedly. After all, it would give us more errand-free time together on the weekends. So I was surprised when he said, "I think it's a terrible idea."

"Rachel," he said earnestly, "you only get this time once. You should be taking him on adventures! Go to the zoo! Park at the aquarium and go to the beach! Live it up! And then," he added, "we'll get a babysitter to come over after Eli goes to sleep, and we'll do your long runs together."

I don't know what that means for the grocery shopping and the laundry, but Friday adventures with my buddy always sound like a good idea.