Summer is well under way, and as I sit here trying to pull together a column, I feel like there is nothing going on that’s worth writing about. This last week or so has been downright boring, and it feels kind of good. Not great. Nowhere near great, but somehow, I feel like we have finally reached some kind of a something.

Since the kids got out of school a few weeks before other schools did, and our summer activities didn’t kick in right away, we had a little bit of downtime with no schedule other than my work and whatever the dogs needed. It wasn’t too long before the kids headed back to jobs and summer workouts, but there was just enough time for them to really rest and get bored enough that they finally took an interest in doing some household chores.

Since E is still just a little too young to get a “real” job for the summer, we negotiated a price for her to clean out and organize all of the drawers and cupboards in the house: $5 per door. She got to work right away in the kitchen and by the end of day one netted herself $20 and I had a pile of mismatched plastic containers and lids that were ready to go to the recycling bin and an in-date spice rack.

I inadvertently created a kitchen cop as well, since she now chastises anyone who doesn’t put containers away with their lids. In fact, I may have overheard her volunteer to take over putting dishes away because “no one else does it right.”

It also seemed like a good time to get everyone well versed in how to do the laundry. During the school year, I can’t handle the stress of someone running out of a school uniform, so I handle laundry duty for everyone. For summer, though, it’s of no consequence to me if they have to pick something off their bedroom floor and wear it for the fourth day in a row.

I have to say, they’ve impressed me. No one has turned white underwear pink, let a load of towels grow musty overnight, or dumped someone else’s clean clothes out of the dryer so that they can shove their wet clothes into it. How clean their underwear are, however, is between them and the drawers.

I haven’t completely checked out of my parental responsibilities. I’ve tried to get back into a better routine of making dinner every night at a time that we can all sit down and eat together. This was something we always did when Steve was alive, but was pretty much unbearable to do until recently.

We’ve even managed to move our meals from standing around the island in the kitchen back to the dining room table on a few occasions.

The dogs are quite delighted as the dining room has become “their” room now, and I haven’t been able to prove it, but I suspect people have been less than careful about what might fall off their plate. I’m sure the fact that everyone started eating their green beans has nothing to do with the fact that they’re Duncan’s favorite healthy snack.

Since we’ve had to make several small trips for college visits, and the boys are going to be attending the Boy Scout Jamboree later this summer, we opted out of taking any kind of real vacation this summer. Instead, I’ve tried to plan a few impromptu smaller trips.

Last weekend, I realized that the Beetlejuice Broadway company was coming to Philadelphia. We had been slated to go see this show back in the Spring of 2020.

Looking at the calendar, I realized that although everyone had plans for the day, we would all be finished and able to get on the road in plenty of time to see the show on Saturday night.

As usual, you know what they say about the best laid plans. The boys’ activity ran a little late, traffic was unusually bad, and then we had a small episode at the parking garage, involving an insistent valet that I did not want to park our car.

We got to the theater just in time for them to blink the lobby lights and sound the chimes. Normally, there would have been much grumbling and complaining about how hungry everyone was, and squabbling over the cramped seating arrangement, but somehow, we managed to grab a box of peanut M & M’s and another of Swedish fish, and shared them during the first act.

We didn’t get to a fast-food place until almost 1 a.m., which for my kids, especially the boys, is tantamount to being starved.

Of course, we got behind someone who had an order even larger than ours and it took us forever to get our order placed. Normally, there would have been much whining and complaining, but instead we talked about the show, and flipped through the coming attractions to see what else we might be able to see this summer.

Even though we had a nice evening out, it was relatively free of any drama or stress, even where there was plenty of room to have some of both.

I realized I was sitting on pins and needles for part of the evening, waiting for a squabble to break out, or whining to start, or any of the hundreds of other things that I’ve come to expect to go wrong, and at the end of the day, nothing happened.

It feels like nothing has been starting to happen a lot more lately, and that is really something.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing columnist who appears weekly in the Times News.