OK, I kid. Summer actually never ends around here for the boys of DadWagon. We’ll be kicking back Bacardi Breezers and shagging cocktail waitresses well into February.

But we know that many of you are the more conventional types, for whom the end of summer means the end of vacation, the beginning of the school year, and a long but ineluctable march toward Seasonal Affective Disorder.

So this week we took an end-of-season approach to things.

Nathan took one last monster trip of the summer with his kids (solo!) to the surprisingly pleasant Midwest, and came home just in time to get his boy crunked and cut at Columbia Presbyterian’s pediatric surgery unit

Christopher (or at least his wife) got puked on and regretted not getting puked on harder. Then again, if his boy keeps turning into a jock, there may be lots of frat parties and plenty of puking still ahead. Perhaps that’s why Christopher seemed engaged by the bizarre anti-children enviro-violence at Discovery Channel HQ.

Speaking of death, in case you missed all the fun and frivolity of Kill Your Child Day on DadWagon, you can still read Nathan and Matt’s vengeful thoughts here and here. [spoiler alert!] Both decided that their children were, at the end of the day, too cute to kill.

We were also impressed with the output of some DadWagon friends this week: Big Preg wrote a lovely summation of the bareknuckle schedule of childrearers on her blog Accidents Will Happen, and occasional DadWagon commenter Nathan Hegedus got the Slate-heads in a tizzy with his piece about Swedish paternity leave (check out his very good blog Dispatches from Daddyland).

Theodore turned his own dark blogmind to issues of JP’s boy-violence and maturation, with a side dish of constipation and infanticide.

Matt wrote about how he loves his daughter’s eyesight and, while gingerly crossing over a preschool picket line, he made one eagle-eyed observation himself: Sasha has started playing house with various stuffed animals. This sent Matt scrambling to our readers asking what kind of doll he should get for her. I think the readers pretty much shrugged off that question, but one commenter from Matt’s past seemed to reveal a dark detail about his childhood. My Buddy, Matt? Really?

That’s all from us; happy labors, and happy Labor Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.