Sometimes, a mama has a day.

And sometimes that day comes at the beginning of a week which includes a kid home sick from school, and her midway defense of her dissertation, and a mock job interview, and her official teaching evaluation, and the start of a five-day conference during which she'll be separated from her young for more than 24 hours for the first time. Sometimes the only thing a mama can do is take the kids to the drive-in Starbucks for a chai latte (mama) and oatmeal cookies (the young) and spend a moment thanking her stars that she lives in a country where you can get a warm latte and cookies without leaving your car. So we did that. And then we took a long, slow bike through the neighborhood collecting leaves and navigating puddles and happily picking a stick out of someone else's yard that we looked at earlier in the week but were too shy to pick up. (This is me, folks, not Peter. Hence Grace's photo of mom with a cool stick...)

Edited to add: click on the little video above and you can hear some of Peter's awesome whistling.