Last Friday was a scorcher, so they scrubbed down the van. The day before, Ruthie begged to go through a car wash but I just couldn’t justify it.

After a good 45 minutes wiping it down, they spent another 45 on the porch filling buckets and playing with the hose. I live for mornings like these.

Annie has been on a love note kick, painting pictures of us then writing the sweetest things on them, folding them up and pretending they’re pieces of trash she randomly found. On one of her last days of school this year she’d painted me a self-portrait and her teacher framed it. She put it by my bed and said “This is me. If you wake up in the night and are scared, just look at me.”