40 : With Summer Halfway Over
When I saw the price tag on that tropical yellow Yadi t-shirt at the ballpark Wednesday night, I was definitely having second thoughts. I always have this thought in the back of my head – “Don’t buy anything nice until the boys are grown and gone.” I really don’t care; it’s just a good rule to follow.
“Eh, get it,” Carrie-Bri advised. “You’ll wear it till it rots.”
That “rotting” process began about fifteen hours later when Yali added a little flourish of his own to this grand purchase: playground dirt. By evening, Puck decided it could use some mayonnaise and lettuce. The party had already started. Estimated “full rot” date: circa one year from purchase.
Meanwhile… Day Three of Art Camp was a weepy one. Rain from the minute the kids left for the art room until pick-up three hours later. Puck and I spent those three hours hanging out in the Honda Fit on the parking lot with a few decks of Spanish vocabulary cards, a ziplock of goldfish crackers, and videos from Colombia on my phone. The minutes passed quickly.
By the time we got home – sun. And probably to stay. Oxbear and Francis had emptied the garage of a decade of junk and picked up sacks of Pickleman’s to share around the table, since Mom and Carrie had also come over to Old English the slowly decaying relics of furniture, and other touch-ups.
Around three o’clock in the afternoon, only Oxbear and Francis remained to chop up the old Ethan Allen couch mortally abused by expired family cats and dogs and haul that away, too. Forever memorialized in old family Christmas photos from the 90s. Almost done. With Phase One at least.
We were getting close to calling it a day. I hadn’t caught up with Puck on his adventures yet, so I took a few moments while he worked on Terraria, his computer game of choice.
“So, did you put the eyes on your emoji at Art Camp today?” I asked him.
“Nope. We’re doing that tomorrow.”
“Well, then what did you work on today?”
“Mom, I’m battling the Wall of Flesh right now. I’m under suspense. … HEY, DAD! I DEFEATED THE WALL OF FLESH!”
I don’t know about today’s generation of computer games, but pretty much the only thing I ever saw growing up was “Oregon Trail”. And I always died of dysentery.