June so far: reading, and truck-watching

This morning, just after Patrick left the house, I noticed that Seamus was being very quiet, and I couldn't see him from the chair where I was sitting, which can sometimes be a bad omen.  But, luckily, nothing precarious was being climbed, nor anything important being shoved into the depths of the diaper bin.  Instead, he was sitting in his room by himself, surrounded by a pile of books, reading.

That's my boy! (By "reading," of course, I mean pointing at pictures of fire trucks.)

Now, he is back out in the living room, where he can see trucks and men doing work on the street.  About a month ago, some city workers came and dug a huge hole/trench on one side of our corner, exposing a big pipe/water main thing.  It took them days and days to dig it up, and every day they would put a big metal slab over their hole and seal the edges with concrete, and then come back in the morning, pry it off, and dig some more, then stand around surveying their work for a few hours, and then dig a little bit more.  Then, there was work done on the pipe thingamajig while the nearby fire hydrant sprayed a bunch of water all over the neighborhood, the hole was filled in and resurfaced, and the trucks drove away.  Then, two days later, they came back and started digging trenches up the hill and working on pipes up there, and finally got all that filled in a few days ago.  This morning, the jackhammers and diggers and dump trucks were back, and they're tearing up a different side of the corner.  It seems like poor planning to me; wouldn't it have been more efficient to all the jackhammering/digging at once, and then all the pipe repair work at once, and then all the resurfacing at once?  But it is like entertainment central for a toddler: week after week after week of real live trucks, right outside our apartment.  Shay keeps running from the front window to the side window, surveying the work.  He has two little steps he can stand up on to see out better, and sometimes he has one at each window, but then sometimes he picks one up and carries it to the other window, so that he can have two side-by-side for a while.  Variety is the spice of life, I guess.

Anyway, that is what is going on here.  That, and I'm staring at about 8 more portfolios of writing that I still need to read -- they are the only thing standing between me and summer vacation, so I know I should just power through them and get it done, but I am at the point where I feel like I can't possibly read any more student work until I've had a vacation.