“It’s the journey, not the destination.”

How many times have you heard those words as a parent? A lot, I bet. If you’re anything like me, I bet that you’ve muttered those words to yourself as you tried to get a toddler to go just about anywhere. I bet you’ve “journey-not-destinationed” yourself through homework or toilet training or the grocery store or sleeping through the night or any number of child-related milestones.

But you know? Sometimes, Zen as it is, that little “journey not destination” mantra can get, well, a wee bit onerous. Sometimes, having someone chirp at you that, “Oh, ha ha, you should just enjoy what’s happening right at this very moment because life with kids is all about the journey, not the destination” can make you feel like punching that person in the throat. It’s tantamount to saying that if you were just a better parent, a better person, you would truly embrace, say, your toddler’s insistence upon stopping to drop pebbles down every single sewer grating on the way home from daycare, thus turning a 10-minute walk into a 90-minute odyssey.

Because here’s the thing: sometimes, no matter how wonderful a person or a parent you are, it’s about the destination. Sometimes, sure, it’s important to be here now. But sometimes, you just want to get there, already. Fast. And with as little screaming as possible.

Nowhere is this more true than on road trips with children.

So, let’s debunk this whole myth of “journey not destination,” shall we? Let’s put to rest once and for all that we are somehow lesser as parents if we feel on occasion that the less time spent in moving vehicles with our children the better. Let’s stop judging ourselves and each other by the degree to which we look forward to and enjoy strapping small, high-energy beings into five-point harnesses and hurtling off into traffic for hours. Because while there while there are undoubtedly lots of excellent things about road trips, there are also lots of rather tedious things.

Sure, there will be moments of pure beauty. You will see a pair of deer standing for a split second at the side of the road and your four-year-old will say, “Mommy, that deer looked right at me!” And you will say, “Yes, she did, honey.”

You will stop at a perfect beach for a picnic lunch and spend an hour skipping stones with your children, and one of them will lean back into your lap and look up at the sky and point out how that cloud looks just like a rabbit. Eating a Chihuahua.

You will prepare a cooler filled with fruit and vegetables and healthy snacks and your children will eat all of those fruits and vegetables and healthy snacks without complaining and you will sail right on by the fast-food chains, drinking tea out of your reusable travel mug, feeling smug virtuous.

You will bring E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web on CD and your entire family will listen, entranced, to the entire story, and you will weep together at its ending.

You will bring a big pile of your own pillows and stack them between your children so that they cannot easily hit each other, and they will make little nests with those pillows and both fall asleep at the exact same time. And while they sleep, you will drive as fast and as far as possible, all the while talking to the other adult in the car and listening to — squee! — your own music on low.

But for all those times, and more, there will also be the times where the kids are too busy scratching at each other in the backseat to notice the scenery and when you go out of your way to visit the World’s Biggest Nickel they will refuse to get out of the car. They will eat only ice cream and deep-fried things for days on end and insist on listening to Diary of a Wimpy Kid or One Direction on repeat. They will clamour for electronic devices and grunt and not look up as you point out, say, the Grand Canyon. They will insist that they don’t need to pee during the rest stop and then have to pee the moment you pull onto the open freeway. The baby will scream unremittingly for the last half-hour of the day’s travels and then fall asleep as you pull into your hotel parking lot. And not one bit at night.

These things — and more — will happen. They are part of road trips. And no matter how good a parent or a person you are, there is no earthly reason you should enjoy those moments. During those moments, your job is to grit your teeth, stick on One Direction and toss your emergency stash of chocolate and the backseat, and drive as fast and as far as possible. Because you’ll get there eventually. I promise.

This post is part of BlogHer’s Family Fun on Four Wheels editorial series, made possible by Mazda CX-9.

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The thing about blogging is that when you miss a week or two it’s hard to figure out how to ease your way back in. We’ve been gone for 16 days, arrived home late Sunday night.

(We weren’t supposed to arrive home “late” Sunday night, but that’s what happens when circumstances that are all largely within your control collude so that you miss your first scheduled flight and end up on the 8:10 PM version thereof, oddly grateful that the stern woman behind the desk at the airline finally agreed to waive the $600 change fee when you whined and complained and begged and cajoled the way you might if you were, say, eight years old and your parents had just taken away all your screen time for the day for making some poor behavioural choices. That’s what happens — and thank God for the near-to-the-airport friends on whom we descended after a volley of desperate texting to hang out for our newly unscheduled afternoon, and who fed us dinner and plied us with chocolate and tea and Manhattans, and set up our kids in front of their television. All in all an entirely pleasant way to spend an afternoon, other circumstances aside.)

But. We arrived home late Sunday night after 16 days away, in Toronto and in Florida, and it feels somehow disingenuous to jump right in to the present moment and gloss over those days, as though I am supposed to provide a “what I did on my winter vacation” summary for you all. At the same time, the idea of providing such a summary — not that anyone has asked me to — seems as tedious and unappealing as I imagine it must be for the many schoolchildren being asked to perform that precise task right now.

Memory is a funny thing — what did we do and did we have a good time? We did so many things: played tourist in Toronto with visits to the CN Tower, Casa Loma, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Science Centre. We saw movies, visited with friends and family, had Christmas dinner with my cousin and her family at Lee Garden on Spadina (“Was it worth the wait?” I later asked my kids about the trade-off of standing in line for an hour versus the food — oh god the food — and the camaraderie. “Yes,” said Rowan, unequivocally. Isaac, who nearly fell asleep in Rachel’s lap after copious bowls of wonton soup, was less sure: “I like the restaurant where you get your food right away,” he said, in reference to the buffet his grandparents took them to in Florida, where there were hotdogs and matzah ball soup and shrimp and ice cream for the taking, no lineup required.) (Also: “Were we this terrible?” I asked my cousin, as our collective five children shoved and pinched and bickered and kicked at each other on the sidewalk as we waited. “We were worse,” she assured me. And I think she might’ve been right.)

(Also: Of course, my children, like countless generations of children before them and countless generations of children to come, laughed and laughed at the name “Spadina.” “Like vagina, Mom,” Isaac told me, “like, on a girl’s body!” Just, you know, in case I might not have known where to look.)

In Florida, we played by the pool and mini-golfed and built sand castles. My dad took Rowan to the driving range and both kids picked up tennis racquets for the first time. We saw different sets of cousins, met new babies and new boyfriends, saw old friends and new movies. We ate ice cream and went to the zoo and played solitaire and Pokémon (some things you don’t get a break from) and took advantage of grandparental babysitting and generally managed quite well, even in the absence of the notable breaks provided by school and day care.

This list is not exhaustive.

Memory is such a funny thing: What did we do and we have a good time? We sat around the swimming pool late one afternoon in Florida, after some glorious outing or other that had been bracketed by children who resisted going and then resisted leaving (this is an ongoing theme, apparently…). And we were feeling, perhaps, tired. Put upon. The kids were being loud, making fart jokes and living on the razor’s edge between torment and pleasure in each other’s company. We were trying to let them be kids take to the extent that we could, always cognizant of the few other people around the pool with us — in this case, a man and a woman who must’ve been in their 70s, give or take.

Having anyone watch you as you parent can be stressful, but having people my parents’ age watch me parent is its own kind of stressful. You know? You know. But these people were fine, were lovely. The man in particular watched my kids and their antics with a grin on his face.

“You’re lucky,” he said to me and Rachel in passing.

And we both paused for a moment, and then, just like that, we were. Lucky.

The man went back to his condo after a while, and his wife packed up her towel shortly afterwards. And I debated with myself for half a second before getting up to speak with her before she disappeared.

“I just wanted to ask you to thank your husband for what he said to us,” I told her. “You know when you have those days or moments when maybe you’re not feeling so lucky? And then you realize you are?”

She smiled at me, quite seriously. “I’ll tell him,” she told me.

And then she asked The Question: “So, whose is whose?”

And I said, “Oh, they’re both ours. We’re partners, and they’re our kids.”

“Oh!” The smile that broke across her face was dazzling, wiping away any trace of seriousness. “That’s wonderful!”

And, in that moment, it was.

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Woke up early and exercised while listening to Jian Ghomeshi talk to Kate Bush on a months-old Q podcast.  Wrote a couple of average paragraphs.  Finished a book outline.  Sent some e-mails.  Ate the leftover homemade pizza.  Drove with my two boys out to a friend’s house on the lake with a bag full of free apples from a garage sale and my trusty Starfrit apple-peeling machine.

Watched my two boys play with her two boys for the next four hours, moving in and out of rooms and back and forth between the two porches, catching toads, playing Checkers, making potions, trapping the dog in the tent, always forgetting to close the door. Peeled apples at the kitchen table, while my friend pickled beets from her garden. Let all the boys, one by one, take turns peeling apples, like we were in Tom Sawyer or something, the spirals of peel unspooling from the fruit.

Learned how to pickle beets. Sliced apples. Picked and ate purslane, calendula, nasturtium. Drank tea. Listened to Harry Potter on the drive home, leftover brine in a canning jar for my own beets. Ate leftovers for dinner. Read new library books to Isaac. Wrote names in Sharpie on four pairs of new sneakers and threaded curly laces through holes. Slowly. Packed backpacks. Played soccer with Rowan as the thunderclouds collected. Made apple crumble topping. Wondered out loud with Rowan which class he’d be in  and discussed which came first, thunder or lightning. Listened to the thunder. Made these beauties.

Wrote this.

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I’m back. I haven’t spent more than four consecutive nights in the same bed since July 21, a feat of bed-hopping I don’t think I have matched since, perhaps, fourth-year university  (joking!) the summer I travelled around Europe in 1993 with my friend Julie.

(Coincidently, in this recent spate of bed-hopping, I spent two nights on Julie’s pull-out couch in the lovely borough of Queens, New York, where I slept quite well. Julie, however, did not, poor thing: her 15-month-old daughter, it seems, has some very strong ideas about exactly when and where she will and won’t sleep, and it seems that the hours between 2 and 4 AM are currently designated Not Sleeping Time.)

But. Now. I am home, from journeys that took me from Thunder Bay to Toronto and back again, to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and then Queens and then South Orange, New Jersey, and then the Manhattan Hilton and BlogHer ‘12 and then back to South Orange, and then Toronto (and another not-sleeping toddler), and then Thunder Bay to wash my clothes and pick up my family and then to a tent in the Sleeping Giant Provincial Park and home, and then to Duluth, Minnesota, and then to the Wisconsin Dells (oh Lord, the Wisconsin Dells — where Vegas meets water. And a vengeful God. And Republicans. And bumper stickers that say things like “I don’t believe the liberal media.”) and then Minneapolis and then Duluth again and then home, where I intend to stay put for a good long time if I have any say in the matter.

Because, frankly, I have things to do.

Chief of which is to make a to-do list.

I am a list maker. I like lists. I need lists. I feel unmoored without one, purposeless. I need to know that there’s a place where I can record every single task, books to read, movies to watch, blog posts and pitches to write, client jobs, phone calls to make, things to renovate. I scribble things down on scrap paper, cross them off, add new pieces of paper, consolidate the items onto fresh sheets, clip the lot together on the clipboard I’ve had since I was 13. This last spate of travel ended Saturday night with me furiously scribbling items onto four different sheets of paper, collating things I had typed into my phone, going through old to-do lists, X-ing out outdated or done items, running through the house with a toothbrush in my mouth to add just one more thing. And then one more.

(Do I count as the liberal media? Just wondering.)

The idea is that I will eventually dictate the entire list into a Word document and print it out, and there it will be: a blueprint of my life, the plan, perfect, just like in Getting Things Done. In reality, it rarely if ever works that way, and I end up with my various scraps of paper, written with different pens, half outdated, never completed. And while I continue to hold on to the fantasy of the finished to-do list, the ordered life, I may also be starting to let go of it, the idea that I can capture it all in one place, that for even one brief shining moment I will know what it is I have to do with this one perfect life, line item by line item until I am done.

(How do you to do?)

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Okay, technically I didn’t find this wee present in my boot this morning. Officially, I found it on the morning of Friday, May 4, in Copenhagen, of all places. Which is where I have been. Which is why I have not been here, writing in this blog.

(Copenhagen! O, Copenhagen, land of beautiful buildings and bicycles and windmills and herring! And smorresbrod! To which I would relocate in a heartbeat if it weren’t for all those things like money and jobs and family and citizenship and language barriers, etc. But I digress: right now, we’re talking about things in boots.)

I found this little bracelet, lovingly made by Isaac, in my left ART Company boot

(… … and then she drifted off onto eBay in search of size 40 ART boots… …)

Hello!

…, the boots, you may recall, that I purchased in Chicago for approximately the cost of what my heart would fetch on the black market. And that was half price. But that’s okay, because they are the most beautiful boots I have ever owned and I adore them.

I was putting on said boots in order to go out for dinner with my girl to Aamaans restaurant, for what turned out to be one of the loveliest meals of the trip (and, o, there were many lovely meals on that trip, lo, yes there were), and finding Isaac’s bracelet seemed like a sweet omen, a reminder of my children, who had conveniently remained in North America while their mothers sojourned abroad in honour of my 40th birthday. (Look soon for a guest post from their caretaker, the indefatigable — or, more accurately, utterly fagged out, no pun intended — Rob, on what was like to take care of them for a week, solo. Heh.)

We were joined at the end of the meal by by this girl I had a fling with during the summer of 1995 my friend Lene and her girlfriend, Maria, who scooped us up and took us out to some bars where there were many younger women dressed up like Simon Le Bon (this seems to be a fashion trend, no? Babydykes in black fedoras with rolled rims and lots of eyeliner?), and who the next day scooped us up in their little Volkswagen and drove us three hours inland to the city of Århus, which I also promptly fell in love with.

We ate the original Danish comfort food at Teater Bodega (I had a dish called Biksemed, which translates roughly into “mixed food,” which is, of course, what it is;

Rachel ate some rock-hard yet delicious bacon with potatoes and parsley sauce and swooned), drank Carlsberg classic, and visited the rainbow panorama on top of the Århus Art Museum.

And we also went to a flea market, where out of the corner of her eye Rachel spied these ART boots.

In her size.

For 30 kroner.

Which translates to approximately five dollars.

And then she bought them. And then I tried very hard not to sulk. Mostly successfully, but with little episodes of sulking breaking through now and then like the opposite of the sun through clouds.

And then Lene, bless her Danish heart, said to Rachel, “You know, I have a pair of cowboy boots in your size that I love but I never wear. Why don’t you take them?”

And then I thought about killing both of them until they were dead, but instead I smiled serenely and encouraged Rachel to just say yes, until I couldn’t help it any more and hissed at her out of the corner of my mouth, “I didn’t sleep with some girl 17 years ago so that YOU could get BOOTS.”

And she smiled back at me, equally serenely, and said, “Apparently, yes you did.”

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Well, hello there, 2012. I missed your debut, of course: I have not voluntarily stayed up until midnight for approximately seven years now, but on this particular New Year’s eve I flopped into bed at about 9 PM in the hopes of catching at least a few solid hours of sleep before our 3:30 AM wake-up call.

Of course, there was no solid sleep to be had. My brain is tricky like that: faced with a wee-hours deadline, it tends to go into panic mode, calculating and then recalculating at regular intervals throughout the night just how many potential hours of sleep the body that houses it may or may not get and at what point it might just be a good idea to cut everyone’s losses and wake up anyway and stumble through the rest of the day like a grouchy zombie.

Fortunately, at this point in my life, I am wise to my brain’s proclivities and have learned how to mostly ignore it. I imagine it as a gerbil running frantically to nowhere in its wheel. “Cute little gerbil,” I think to it, “you just go and run away over there until you’ve tired yourself out and meanwhile I will focus on my breathing.” This mindset, while far from perfect, is still a vast improvement over the sheer panic that constituted my mental life when Rowan was a newborn and the scarce chance I had to sleep uninterrupted (more formally known as hours between 3 and 8 AM when Rachel was on duty; I had the 9 PM to 3 AM shift) was entirely spent joining my brain on its gerbil wheel to nowhere, fuming and angsting about how tired I was and would be and would always be and whose idea was this baby anyway. (I remember writing thank-you notes for the piles and piles of gifts we got when he was born and suppressing the urge to write, just once, “Thank you for the so-called ‘sleeper.’ Unfortunately, it does not work and we are returning it. Please send a functioning one.”)

And now, I just think, Well, this sucks, but the worst thing about it is that I’m going to be tired tomorrow.

PERSPECTIVE. TOTALLY. RULES.

Okay, fine, but where were you going at 3:30 in the morning, Susan? Well, Toronto, of course. And Cleveland, obviously. Followed ultimately by Florida, where we finally stopped. And stayed for a glorious week of lounging and swimming and ping-pong and Solitaire playing. (“If we just moved to Cleveland,” Rowan mused as we climbed onto our third airplane of the day, “then it would take a lot less time to get to Florida.” This is true. It is also true that perhaps we should have booked our flights a little earlier on in the season. And it is also true that it was a lot nicer when there were direct flights to Minneapolis from Thunder Bay, but I’m not in charge of that.)

Our first night in Florida, the kids’ grandparents ever so graciously babysat (a favour they granted twice more during the week we were there, bless them) while Rachel and I bucked up and went out for our now-traditional dinner at the totally awesome Rhythm Café in West Palm Beach with Fiona and Jen, Toronto friends whom we see, naturally, only in Florida. (Increasingly, this seems to be the way things roll in my circles: why would you see someone in Winnipeg or Toronto when South Beach or Deerfield or Delray beckon?) “Fake it till you make it,” Rachel and I vowed to each other as we got in the car and navigated the I-95, bowing to the premise that if we acted well rested, we would be. It totally worked: the four of us ate and bitched about travel and — lovingly — our children and caught up in general and then rounded out the meal with three desserts and four forks ( the peanut butter pie was the surprise favourite). Our waitress looked like Leslie Feist (I told her that and she had never heard it before). And you know what? After 18 consecutive hours of wakefulness, we closed the place. Because, apparently, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Happy 2012!

The very rare spoonbill we saw at the Wakodahatchee Wetlands.

And the alligator lurking not 10 feet away. And I thought, "This could end badly."

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Summer is slipping away, like minnows slipping through his fingers. I’m trying not to pine already for the easiness of it all, for the way we can just slip outside in bare feet, hop on bikes (not in bare feet), pick dinner vegetables directly out of the garden — Isaac eating a carrot after carrot, getting mad if we cut off the green frond tops — throw them on the grill. I’m trying not to pine for Rob, who is here for only four more days of his four weeks with us, for our communal dinners and games of chase and water fights in backyards and adult conversations about writing in broken moments. (And babysitting. I’m trying not pine for the free and easy babysitting, even as Rachel and I prep for the second of the two overnight getaways Rob’s presence has afforded us this summer; two whole nights away, dinners out and sure, let’s split the whole bottle of wine, because we can sleep in the next morning. Nothing like the luxury of a hangover with no one to care for.) I marvel at Rowan, riding his bicycle as though he’s always known how; now we head out for an hour to the school playground after dinner — “I wonder who my teacher will be,” he muses, looking through the glass of the locked doors of the building — go around the block a few more times before bed. I forage for back-lane raspberries as though they will somehow save my life, taking Ziploc bags on walks and Tupperware in my bicycle panniers, just in case I happen upon a patch or two on my way somewhere, anywhere. We’re harvesting beets, and Rachel and I steam the greens with the idea of freezing them to sneak into sauces through the winter, but end up eating them directly out of the pot. We walk through the farmers’ market at the moment and there’s very little to buy that we don’t already have growing in the boxes I’ve built at home, and what we don’t have the kids are already trading with our neighbours across the street (“We’ll sell it to you for free,” Rowan tells Relia, whose kids were this age 20 years ago, as he picks yet another zucchini to add to her pile and then can’t believe his luck when she takes each kid by the hand to her garden across the street and they return with cucumbers, Swiss chard, peas.). No, there’s very little to buy that we don’t already have in abundance, all around us, and so I’m trying to remember to enjoy it now (and maybe not write about it so much) and to remember just how much I love the smell of autumn air.

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Here is Rowan’s artistic interpretation of his recent camping trip:

In the middle, you will observe a tent with three smiling stick figures inside: the two little ones are Rowan and Isaac, and the bigger one, natch, is Rachel. Off to the right, in his own little tent, is Rob-the-donor. If you look closely, you can just make out what he’s thinking:

At the top is the requisite kindergarten-grade sun. To the right is Lake Superior, clear and warm, shallow for miles in under the August sky.

But, you’re thinking to yourself, someone is missing. Susan, where are you?

Guess.

Maybe you have been eaten by a bear? Perhaps you are visiting the Portapotty? Trying to patch the slow leak in the air mattress?

No, no, and no.

Oh.

Maybe, then, you are soaking commando in a hot tub underneath the stars before taking yourself off for ice cream and to see a late showing of The Kids Are All Right — which did, after all, come to Thunder Bay! Later, maybe you slept in, and then woke up to do yoga before settling in for a morning of quietly reading the manuscript of your novel-in-progress. After which, maybe you went for a long walk, picked some raspberries, returned home to finish your readthrough, and then went out for a long-overdue dinner with a friend. Maybe you ate slow-cooked ribs and gumbo and jambalaya. Maybe you read your girl friend’s copy of the third Stieg Larsson novel in bed and then slept, uninterrupted by partiers in the next campground over or a shrieking baby in the next tent or your own three-year-old son, who never quite settled and hopped from Thermarest to Thermarest every two hours through the night. Maybe you woke up to do more yoga and plot out the events of your novel on a spreadsheet before making gazpacho and pasta with tomatoes, cucumbers, chard, and parsley from your very own garden, ready for your sunsoaked family when they returned after their 48 hours away from you. Maybe you all watched The Empire Strikes Back together when they got home.

Bingo.

Maybe you missed them.

Maybe.

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And that photo wasn’t even staged — can you believe it? Just a random assortment of things that made it onto our kitchen counter a few evenings ago, including the requisite stainless steel water bottles, one of the rocks the kids wanted to watch change colour under the water from the kitchen tap, some bangles, and Isaac’s penny tree — those copper disks are pennies flattened underneath real trains on real train tracks. And that Mrs. Potato Head is a real Mrs. Potato Head made from real plastic. So authentic we are.

The babysitter is on a much-deserved holiday, and that means Rachel and I are going to halfsies on child care this week. Right now, until, oh, precisely 12:30 today, it’s my half. Not that I’m counting. I will be cramming a week’s worth of work into the other half, in addition to the moments I have stolen while some DVDs are watched by some children or while Isaac naps. Oh, yes, we’ve reinstated the nap, for obvious reasons. Yesterday afternoon he slept for three glorious hours, woke up happy as a Teletubby, and went to bed at a quarter to ten. But that’s okay, because I got a shitload of work done while he slept. The day before, I managed to conduct a telephone interview while Isaac slept and Rowan watched Wall-E. It sort of worked, except for when I had to put the very nice lady I was speaking to on hold, twice, once to unstick the DVD from its FBI warnings against copyright infringement, the second to put butter on Melba toast.

But it’s not all work and pawning the children off on sleep and Pixar: I’ve been swimming, playing dreidel, teaching Rowan how to play Rummy-Q (yes!), playing chase in the backyard, reading Roald Dahl books. In the evenings, we fill two big green tubs — the kind normal people would put ice and beer in at parties — with warm water and bubbles, and the kids have “bucket baths” on the deck. Last night, after they were asleep, I snuck out and picked up hot fudge sundaes at Merla Mae, our local softserve, and Rachel and I ate them on the deck and watched the sunset.

Sadly, I can’t seem to find the time to write about the kids in much detail when I am actually spending time with them. This is a mixed gift, of course, and my project is to focus on the gift part of that mix, at least until 12:30 today. In the meantime, this is what you get: a random assortment of things that for now will have to suffice as a real composition.

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Ding, dong, the fridge is dead! And long live the fridge!

Okay, it’s not quite dead, but the Eaton Viking model manufactured sometime in the early years of the Reagan Administration that has been chugging away in our kitchen since well before we moved in is slowly dying. And we are more than happy to pull the plug.

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the fridge’s demise for a while. Each time something goes awry, we call Franz, our inscrutable appliance repair guy, and I cross my fingers that he’s going to take a look, shake his head, and say, “You know, I think it might be time to say goodbye.” But he never does. Instead he tightens a hose or replaces the timing mechanism in his understated way, as I hover and ask leading questions. He never takes the bait.

“So,” I’ll say. “When, in your expert opinion, do you think we should call it quits and replace this thing?”

“That depends,” he’ll say. “But, generally, when it stops cooling things.”

It’s not quite that I need Franz’s permission to buy a new refrigerator. It’s just that it somehow feels more responsible to go purchase a major appliance “because our appliance guy told us to,” rather than “because it’s an ugly relic of the early 1980s.” I mean, take a look:

Yes, yes, I know that the newer fridges are much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but I just would have savoured that little nudge from Franz in the right direction. (And, why, yes: those are white melamine cupboards! They go so nicely with the flowered linoleum floor, don’t you think? But I digress.)

In any case, Rachel and I noticed a puddle of water emanating from underneath the Viking a couple of days ago and decided enough was enough. We briefly consulted Consumer Reports, measured the space, hightailed it over to Sears and picked out a new — Energy Star–rated — model in basic black, in approximately 20 minutes. Our salesperson was an odd mixture of completely not homophobic and utterly sexist: got it right away that we were a couple, asked how many kids we had at home, compared notes with us on child-rearing, but also made fun of Rachel for being “a sarcastic woman” and me for being “an opinionated woman,” while suggesting that it was a good thing we had two sons instead of two daughters — “because four women in one household – hooo boy.”

It was oddly refreshing.

So, we buy the fridge. It’s going to be delivered the first week of September. And then I mention to Rowan later that evening that the current fridge will soon be gone, to be replaced by a new one.

And he loses it.

“I don’t want the fridge to go away,” he wails. “I don’t want a new fridge. I want this fridge. I love this fridge.” Tears, shuddering sobs, snot, the whole bit. I think he might have even hugged the old Viking. It took about 20 minutes to calm him down and distract him, with promises that the current fridge would still be there when he woke up in the morning, that everything would be okay.

So, what’s with the sudden passion for the fridge? I mean, of course, he loves to stand in front of the thing with the door open while I intone like a robot about wasting energy and all, but beyond that, I’ve never known him to profess any great love for the beast. My sense is that — of course — it’s about something else.

And that something else? Just a hunch, but this: Rob is leaving soon.

If you look closely, you can just make out the face of a man in two photographs tacked up to the side of the fridge. That’s Rob, with each of the boys as babies. Rob is our cherished friend, our sperm donor, a key part of the extended family, and Rowan and Isaac’s, well, their “Rob,” who currently lives and works in a different city but who has spent the past five weeks with us, playing Chase and Cat in the Hat and Princesses and Chutes & Ladders and Pokémon and computer games with the boys, holding slumber parties and sleepovers, babysitting and hanging out and cooking and talking and eating ice cream with us and generally being a mensch.

But, summer days are slipping away. Soon, August will give way to September and school and work commitments, and Rob will have to leave.

None of us — me, Rachel, Rob — can actually talk about the upcoming goodbye. The last time Rob left, I sat with two sobbing little boys on the front steps as the car pulled out of the driveway on its way to the airport, Rachel and Rob white-faced in the front seat. The plan had been for Rowan to accompany them to the airport, but he wouldn’t get in the car, as if that might somehow delay the inevitable. But the inevitable, it has a funny way of happening in the end.

So, it’s getting colder. The fall will come, and we’ll stick old pictures on our sexy new fridge — which will, undoubtedly, chill the milk much more efficiently than its predecessor. And try not to pine too much for, uh oh, those summer nights.

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