This week has been all about summer fun for AJ and also all about running mommy ragged. Yesterday, AJ came home from camp absolutely blitzed. He was too tired even to eat lunch and by 12:15 he was snoring loudly in his bed. Consequently, he was awake again much earlier than usual and I had more afternoon time to fill before dinner. He accompanied me on a sweaty two block walk up and over the hill, past the pasture and down the other side to the mailbox where I could mail transcript requests for the dossier service I finally set up yesterday. [If anyone is remotely interested, a dossier service is essentially an electronic document storage system that academics use for job applications. I imagine other fields use them on occasion too, but they seem to be virtually mandatory these days in my line of work.]

By the time we walked back home a few minutes later we were hot and sweaty, so I hauled out the sprinkler from a dusty garage shelf and set it up. AJ was jumping up and down with excitement. He ran into his house, grabbed his bathing suit from a drawer (leaving a trail of discarded clothes and underwear in his wake), and ran outside in what seemed like seconds. �Mommy, where�s your bathing suit? Come on!� AJ stood a little shyly off the edge of the circle of water spraying into the air. Until I shoved him into the middle. Pretty soon we were both running through it, shrieking every time we were hit with the spray. It was pretty fan-damn-tastic. I hope the image of AJ standing in the sun grinning in anticipation of the soaking he was about to get stays in my mind as clearly as it is right now. It was perfect.

This morning, however, was not perfect. AJ was grumpier than grumpy. He wouldn�t eat his breakfast, argued about absolutely everything, and actually began hurling objects across the room at one point, including his violin. He spent a lot of time in solitary (our preferred household term for what others call the �time out corner� or the �naughty step�). Just when things were looking extremely grim for his day, he received a reprieve in the form of an invitation from his friend D to come over and play. There were three 4-year-old boys, one two-year-old boy, and three month old girl and three moms in a very small space on a very hot day. The boys were tearing around like maniacs, consequently there was some kind of crisis causing one or more of the boys to burst into tears approximately every 10 minutes. The baby, miraculously, slept through most of it. I came home drained from attempting to get AJ to behave himself. AJ was drained too. He went straight to sleep and, two hours later, is still sleeping. And I can guarantee you that I won�t be the one waking him up.

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