I have four piles of final exams on my dining room table. I had hoped by assembling them into neat stacks and by making some excellent checklists, the papers would just go and grade themselves. Sadly, not.

Ian and I spent the day together. I picked him up at 11:15 from his morning school. We came home for bologna and American cheese sandwiches. He watched a video he had picked up from the library, I Love Toy Trains, Number 10 and 11. It’s two full hours of footage of model trains. The video was so boring that it actually drove me to grade half a stack of papers. Then, speech therapy. We had a couple of hours before Jonah came back, so we called up his buddy, Ryan, for a playdate.

Ryan and Ian are always dragged along to their older brothers’ sports events, so they see each other a lot. Ryan is cool with the fact that Ian doesn’t talk much. They spent two hours playing with water and mud and trucks. Ryan’s mom and I sat on the back steps talking about kitchen remodeling and summer camp. Every once in a while, we hollered, “get that water hose away from us, boys.” Nice day.