To Annie: this is how you spent the day you turned 6 years and 1 month old.

You roll in right on time, in a silly mood all day after your weekend cold. It’s blueberry waffles and pineapple for breakfast, with a side of mango yogurt pouch. Hello, fruit flavors. You consent to a hair-brushing and goof your way through a kindergarten lesson where you sort letters into spanish words.

At school, you and a fire-line of tiny children help carry in the 30 bananas, 16 pounds of strawberries, and the rest of the trunkful of snacks for the week of school. When you realize you’ve left your backpack full of sunglasses in the car, you drop your bunch of bananas on the ground and head back for it directly. Gotta admire your single-mindedness.

You won’t tell us much about the school day, but Paul comes home covered head-to-toe in blue paint, so must have been fun. You bound in at 5 hungry for dinner and still full of sillyness. When Dad claims to know a few words of French, you ask him how to say ten, and then notice its similarity to ten in Spanish, and we have a pretty interesting conversation about the relationship between the languages. Paul keeps it rolling with such thought-provokers as, “What if I tried to gargle the Earth?”

You ask to be excused and for permission to get a cup of milk and a bowl, which you take outside so you can pretend to be a cat drinking it. We join you there in a few, and you assist with emptying the wading pool. When Paul’s blue-painted skin begins melting into the deck, we decide its bathtime, and you two have a good soak.

It’s early yet! We finish up with an episode of the new PBS show “Donkey Hodie” (get it?). It includes wholesome lessons and songs (“Step One: Practice. Step Two: Practice some more! Step Three: Practice.”) There’s also a purple panda. You seem to like it.

As sometimes happens at night, your energy level escalates, and you opt for wrestling and sommersaults over book-reading. When it’s time for the last story, you hop into bed agreeable enough, looking forward to your current-favorite Harry Potter. Paul’s riled up, too, though, and can’t stay quiet for the story, so I bow out with regrets and a little light finger-wagging.

You go off the deep end, screaming and wailing for, let’s see, 20 minutes now…30…50—it’s hard to count, or think actually. Remembering Paul’s recent reprimand for spilling water and leaving it to soak into the floor for hours, you start pouring water randomly around the room. Dad sops it up. You continue to wail. It’s a stand-off. We will not be moved.