When a friend surprises you with two grocery sacks filled with 40 water balloons, you scrap the trip to the library and the chore chart you were planning to make and get busy with those balloons.

And when the balloons prove so resilient--so expertly crafted--that regular tosses and drops and even point-blank pitches do nothing to impair them, you get busy stomping on them, sitting on them, and belly flopping on them.

And then you change out of your drenched clothes and eat pasta with peas in your bathrobe.

Partly the grace of summer. Partly the grace of raising a child.