Invincible summer

Bee and I go to the pool most afternoons, she in a baby-sized swimsuit dotted with cherries and I in a perhaps overly-modest tankini-swimskirt thing more suitable for an older gal -- but it's a step up from the maternity swimsuit I was safety-pinning to myself despite weighing less now than before I was pregnant. (Yeah, the sight of me in that maternity suit was just pitiful. Fortunately for everyone, Ben went down into the cellar boxes and dug out the tankini-swimskirt thing for me after an evening of listening to me complain about not being able to find my pre-pregnancy bathing suit. I'm very happy to have it back, but I do wonder why I bought such a reserved suit back in my roaring twenties, when I was so young and skinny! I should have been more ostentatious, clearly.)

So, anyway, yes, Bee and are doing this mommy-and-baby-at-the-pool thing all summer, and I kind of love it. She enjoys playing (and shrieking) in the water, and I like getting out of the house and talking to other humans. Actually, I kind of wish this summer could last forever.

In other summertime news, Bee's grandparents are visiting us this week, and the baby seems to really appreciate that we have bolstered the number of available personnel. There are more laps to sit in, more faces to watch, more adult-sized fingers to cut teeth upon (ow). There's also A DOG OMG A DOG!, by whom Bee is utterly transfixed. (She won't remember our dog, who went to pup heaven* when Bee was just two or three months old.) Anyway, our handsome little visitor is quite a good and pleasant little dog, but he once had his beard yanked (by Bee) during a previous visit to our home, and that harrowing experience seems to be frozen, vividly, in his mind. You really can't blame him, and the put-upon creature now steers utterly clear of Bee -- who, of course, would prefer that the pup come within beard-pulling distance. She gesticulates wildly around the dog, calls out a variation on his name ("Dooo!"), and observes longingly his nervous canine activities and one-eye-open sofa-naps.

What else, what else? Well, there's this nice thing: one recent hot afternoon, my wonderful mother-in-law and I went shopping, then stopped to drink iced coffees in a cafe, with Bee in tow, and I almost felt, for the first time since Bee was born, like a normal person -- and not an inmate at an Iranian prison operated by a hungry, sleepless baby. The trip involved a car ride that went pretty well, and then, later that day, I took Bee swimming with a friend who has a little girl just a bit older than Bee. It was a glorious, happy, fun summer day, and I vowed to pack more of those into our remaining weeks of summer. I will! I shall! I must!

* After being bad-mouthed by me all over the world wide interwebz during my pregnancy. Rest in peace, pooch.