Our day-care center is closed for the week of Independence Day. I don’t understand it–nobody else takes the week off, and isn’t the POINT of day care to cover for you when you’re at work?–but that’s the situation, and we aren’t going to change it. Both my wife and have heavy-duty workloads this week, and it would be a bad time for a vacation. So it’s time to call in the shock troops two by two: the grandparents. We are extremely lucky in that all four grands are (a) local, (b) healthy, and (c) enthusiastic. My parents just about wore themselves out chasing our little guy today, and went home giddy. They’ll be back tomorrow.

A week like this makes me grateful for their proximity, and also (yet again) reminds me how thin the support structure behind our parenting is. And we are the ones who have the deck stacked in our favor! At least we have (a passable if vastly diminished amount of) disposable income, a pretty good apartment, no illness or disability or horrible marital strife, and so forth. Cut back on any of those shaky props to a manageable lifestyle, and we’d have genuine problems. Remove a couple more of them, and we’ll find ourselves in the hanging-on-by-a-thread situation of thousands if not millions of people in this country. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If we are barely making this all work, that means a vast number of people cannot make it work at all. Gripe all you want about creeping socialism, but I could use just a touch of it this week. Preferably Swedish-style, since it’s probably not 103 degrees there.