Sitting.

Right now they're all outside in their swimsuits (thank goodness I remembered to ask Hannah to send them along) playing with the new feature in our yard:  a water faucet.  Mark salvaged the fixture, an old distilled-water faucet, from a lab at work.  What's great about the faucet is that the knob is spring-loaded; you turn it to let the water flow, but when you let go, it snaps back and the water stops.  It's really hard to rig it to stay open, too.  At least, the kids haven't figured it out yet.  

He fixed the faucet to the sandbox; when it's turned on, it pours onto our brick patio.  Mark put a large patio paver right under the stream to deflect it so it wouldn't blow the sand out from between the bricks.  It's a temporary solution — theoretically, he'll get around to putting some kind of drain or gutter in.  The faucet is connected to one of the outdoor spigots via a Y-fixture, so we can still access the spigot if we need to use the garden hose or the sprinklers.  The spigot is outside the fenced back yard, though, so if we want to turn it off and prevent the kids from using it, we just turn it off and on at the spigot and lock the gate.

We started the day with a lovely breakfast (a little expensive –maybe we shouldn't have let each of the six kids order their own orange juice) at a restaurant I love that's halfway between our houses.  I had a fabulous fontina-roasted tomato quiche and Hannah had crab cakes benedict — both of our plates were big enough that we each took home leftovers for lunch.  (I can tell you that the quiche was every bit as good straight out of the fridge for lunch, next to a green salad.)  The kids shared caramel rolls, bacon, and fruit cups.   Then I loaded everyone into my minivan and took them back to my house, while Hannah went home to print, collate, hole-punch and bind.  And, I hope, have a nice quiet cup of tea in there somewhere.