Whoo, hoo! Number 3695.

I am SO tired of swim team. This is our eighth year doing swim team and although I managed to finish a book during the meet, I'm just lately finding it all so meaningless, you know? Honestly, who CARES whose child comes in first? And outside of the little ones, even the big kids don't seem to care so much. I actually had to bring our middle child home early because she had too much sun and was threatening to vomit, but I'm starting to think maybe we've outgrown swim team. The girls are actually pretty good swimmers, but we're switching them to a Christian school next year which HAS a swim team, so it's not like we need to swim during the summer. Mostly, I just had that weird sense which I remember having when we lived in Northern Virginia -- that somehow we're almost caricatures of ourselves, the earnest parents cheering on their overprivileged, soft, helicoptered kids. I just felt so . . ORDINARY, so like everyone else, with my new pedicure and my flashy new Walmart clothes, drinking my diet Coke and sitting in the sun. We even all look alike down here in Southern land -- and so do our kids. I noticed that last year's crop of little blonde boys had grown up and had immediately been replaced by another crop of little blonde boys -- and we now have 133 kids on the swim team, so I guess we really ARE all interchangeable. I just briefly had this sense of the world being so vast, and time being so long, and all of us growing up and being replaced by others who ARE EXACTLY THE SAME as us. Hard to put into words. It sort of frightened me, my little glimpse of eternity.

On happier fronts, I'm starting to actually think of being the 2000's, rather than the 3000's for reviewing. I'm just going to keep climbing that mountain of books. (And my 'neighbors' on the chart no longer include that creepy romance novel dude, although 3696 frightens me a bit as well, what with his vampire fetish and all . . just saying)