16 : Pasta in the Genes

We were about two weeks away from school now. This meant Yali’s first round of youngster speech therapy was about to come to a close. Session number ten ended with his therapist accolading him for attempting two and three word phrases without much prompting. Yali just grinned his chubby toasty dimples back at her.

The later afternoon was hot. But not too hot for the boys to cover the driveway in a few chalk drawings. “Drawings”. Mostly giant triangles that read “KEEP OUT”.

“What does that say, Puck?”

He grinned. “It says, ‘Stop, Idiot!’”

It actually said, “Stop, Idoit,” but I didn’t bother to fix it.

“MOM! IS IT TIME TO EAT YET?”

This is a question I hear Puck ask about twenty times a day.

“Soon, bud, soon.”

An answer I give him about twenty times a day.

Finally, the real answer Puck had been waiting for arrived at around five o’clock in the afternoon.

“You guys ready for spaghetti?”

“YES!!”

Well, “spaghetti”. Puck’s idea of spaghetti is nothing more than pasta slathered in butter.

“No sauce?” he wanted to make sure.

“No sauce.”

And Yali’s right behind him. Of course, this all took place after they had eaten a third of the box of angel hair pasta. Raw. Uncooked.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

They get that from their Aunt Rose. I have no other explanation for it. Uncooked pasta is like candy to them.

Once the cooked version was finally ladled into bowls in front of them, they went to town on it. Yali went in two fistfuls strong, eventually making those pasta fists fight each other in a battle to the death. By this point in the day, I let him do it.

Oxbear and I were a little spoiled now that we had “built-in babysitting”; Gloria suggested we take advantage of it. Two date nights back to back. So once Yali was sawing logs in the back room, we split. Adidas and Five Guys Burgers. There are some bonuses to not living at home for the past three and a half weeks.