Monday: Benji deconstructing Great-Grandma Jane’s kitchen. All those plastic and metal bowls must be separately examined, tossed, banged, stacked, and licked.

Tuesday: Mom took Benji for the afternoon and I took myself on an almost 50-mile ride — so luxurious! I met up with Dad and we had a really lovely time.

Wednesday: No picture because I spent most of the day working while Mom watched Benji again. We also had a landscaping person come in to give a bid on our yard, and I’m sure stuff happened in the afternoon that I just can’t remember.

Thursday: I went to a work meeting in the morning while my in-laws stayed with Benji, and just as I got home (30 minutes late, having missed the earlier bus by 5 minutes), Benji woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

This is a lousy screen shot from a video that barely captured it, but Benji is now pushing his high chair around like a rolling toy. He rolled it all the way across the kitchen and into that corner.

Now, in addition to knocking towers over, we’ve figured out that we can build towers! These are also shots from a video, so the quality isn’t good, but you can see the tower growing.

Benji and I also went to the grocery store using the bike trailer. It’s been cool and foggy lately, but we haven’t had rain, so we just bundled up and it was fine. I took a longer loop rather than going straight there, and let me say once again: Every hill and incline sure does come through when towing a trailer. Especially when towing a trailer with 22-lb Benji PLUS a “restock-the-house” grocery run.

Funny how the Strava route says “there are no achievements on this ride.” I consider getting us going AT ALL an achievement, plus the towing up all the little hills, plus fitting groceries into the trailer’s trunk and still managing to get us home all while keeping Benji calm — this ride had more achievements than most “real” rides I do!

Friday: I have no idea what we’re going to do, because most of our friends are busy and my mom (our fall-back person to visit) is out of town. Now Benji is down to one long morning-ish nap, the afternoon by ourselves can get pretty long.

In other news, this week, after much soul-searching, I decided not to rejoin my bike racing team. There’s a long and painful story associated with that decision, and it’s not a choice I wanted to make, but having lived with the decision for this week, I think it’s the right one for right now. This leaves me rather at loose ends, biking wise; I do best with goals to work towards, and if I’m not racing, I don’t know what those will be for the year. I would like to try to train for RAMROD or some other ultra-distance event again, but I don’t know that I have time for that in life right now. I need some biking goal that I can train for in a few 2- to 3-hour chunks per week. Hmm.