Something to keep you occupied while I work my way through work-related piles of PDFs and out of my blogging slump.

I don’t remember when we bought our first whiteboard. I think I may have bought a large one to use when I was a teacher, then to my husbands dismay, brought it home and hung it somewhere in the house. He ended up hanging it in the basement office, where it still hangs today usually filled with Clare’s temporary artwork or Dean’s explanation of some math or financial formula. When the children were very young he’d have them sit on a mini-John Deere tractor and they’d have lessons in math, written on the whiteboard. He called these sessions “Math Tractor”.

I purchased two smaller whiteboards, possibly for school as well, that ended up in the kitchen. One on the refrigerator and one above the doorway to the hallway leading to the living room. The one on the refrigerator was used to write notes while on the telephone or to let others know where we’d gone and when we’d be back. The whiteboard above the doorway was mostly used by Dean when he had something really important to say because it would be found lying on the counter with the important message — something the rest of us would find hard to miss.

The other day Dean replaced one of the whiteboards on which I’d accidently used permanent marker to write down a phone number of a caller. As soon as he attached the new whiteboard to the side of our refrigerator he wrote: New Whiteboard Rules. I thought, “it sure does”, but knew he’d have more to say on the subject.

Sure enough, yesterday morning I saw this when I wandered into the kitchen for my morning coffee:

Andrew, who rarely, if ever, used any of the whiteboards must have been inspired, because, to let us know he was headed to the beach with a friend, he’d taken down the old whiteboard from above the doorway, placed it on the counter and written this:

Like father like son?

A fun tease?

Or simply coincidence?