The boys’ rooms are a neat trick of time: They’re nurseries and kid bedrooms and tween caves all at once. The walls are the same colors as when each was born (apple green; wolf gray); the art on the walls, for the most part, is the same, too. There’s the Charley Harper print; there’s the framed reptilian alphabet that one set of grandparents sent to the older boy when they found out that we truly were calling him The Toad. We still do, sometimes.

Both boys have 500-pound-rated, hot pink cargo nets bolted into their ceilings, hammock-swings that have been reading nooks, jungle gyms, stuffed animal holders. The teenager — no. Wait. He cannot be. He’s still an infant, still in the rocker that we painted sky blue. He’s still in the crib; he’s in the toddler bed; he’s 7 years old and on the bottom bunk, falling asleep while we read to him. The teenager still has that bunk bed, the one that he and I put together from a kit of 4,000 inscrutable pieces. The teenager has a wall full of books. The teenager has a piano keyboard, can play quite well. The teenager has a desk he never uses. The keyboard’s on the desk.

For his 9th birthday, we turned the little one’s room into a casino. Green-felt card table, poker chips, LED lights that chase and run and change colors around his ceiling. Last summer, we snuck away for a quick beverage at the place around the corner and came home to find that the boys had converted The Wee’s room into a hotel. We’d caved and bought a big TV for downstairs, and our kids had no trouble rewiring the small TV, cable and streaming and all, into the upstairs bedroom. We’d also bought a sectional, and they requisitioned the old sofa for up there. The Wee’s got a double bed and a pretty nice yard-sale dresser, and the whole thing reads like if you handed the keys to a mid-level hotel chain to a 10-year-old with a very limited budget.

We still each tell them both good night every evening. There are songs and nighttime words and various incantations. The little one sleeps with a bear as big as he is; the big one sleeps with baseball on the radio. They’re not quite at band posters on the wall, not quite at snapshots of summer camp and school dances, not quite at asking to paint the walls black. The ghosts of their smaller selves abound. There are Legos in the corners, ball-pit balls in the closets.

How many board books? How many wizards and kid detectives and Judy Blume heroines? So many sleepovers. So many snuck chocolates and chips. Cups of tea on the nightstands, one massive red beanbag that has a rotating residency between the two rooms. Both rooms get great light, something I notice when New Dog and I go to wake them in the mornings. You see them sleeping like that, and they’re babies again, but also themselves at this age and all the others. Piled under all those blankets, dog snuggled in, 15 minutes until they have to wake up for real — you hope for so many things, but most of all, you hope they know that they’re home.