And the children descend.

You have had more than one workday where your children’s room is at capacity or close to it from 9 when it opens to 4:45 when it closes. Summer means that kids don’t have a place to be during the day (since summer camp is usually a privilege reserved for higher socioeconomic status folks), so they come with their parents to the family justice center. You cease to be Savannah, a girl from Duke with her head on her shoulders, and step into the roles of “paint dispenser,” “automatic paper towel machine explainer,” and “sous chef in play kitchen.” And you love it.

Every kid that comes through the door of the children’s room has such a wonderful, big personality. You talk to one boy for nearly half an hour re: Steven Universe theories (how will Jasper’s redemption arc play out?!) and then about his reaction video YouTube channel he wants to get started.

A sibling pair establish a pretend functional restaurant, taking orders on a chalkboard and serving up plastic delights to other children drawing at the table. One three-year-old boy comes in and spends the first ten minutes going through every item in the room and asking “¿Qué es eso? ¿Qué es eso?” You’re pretty sure three-year-olds are not capable of this level of complex, multi-perspective scheming, but you can’t help but get the feeling after a while that he’s testing you on your Spanish vocabulary. (Which has been getting better as you have more and more chances to practice it.)

You also learn, perhaps most importantly of all that it is nearly impossible to explain to children under five the concept of washing your brush out before changing colors on the watercolor palette.

After this experience repeats multiple times, you have half a mind to just not mention that you have paint in the room, or limit the ages of the kids that can use it. But today a little girl asks if she can paint, and you say “would you like to draw instead?” She shakes her head no.

“I have markers and crayons, but I don’t get to have any paint at home,” she says, and you can feel those words somewhere between your ventricles, reminding you that at the end of the day, you’re here to be kid-centric. If that takes sitting next to a child and moving their hand to the water cup whenever it looks like they’re aiming for the yellow with a blue-covered paintbrush, well…so be it.

You feel good in your skin, in your mind, and in your work. You love your morning train rides and your weekends spent reading in Union Square park. And you can hardly believe that there are only two weeks left.

You find yourself wanting desperately to turn back the time so that you can stay here working and living longer (since with every day that passes, you love your job more and you find another amazing thing in the city). You’ve essentially decided that you MUST go to grad school here and have casually changed your entire four-year plan to have a higher shot of getting into a particular Columbia program. This summer has been incredible, and you wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. However, one of your friends back home did just get a new dog, so you’re not entirely bummed about the Moxie Project ending.