5 : A Little Mindless Work
Mid-week I had somehow injured my right wrist, doing something I didn’t remember doing. Most likely one of my boys had inadvertently damaged it by running into me or something else silly like that. So by Thursday I put a brace on it to prevent further injury. When Carrie-Bri saw me wearing it, she had her suspicions.
“What did you do to your… Hey, wait a second. Did Matt Holliday just injure himself or something? Is this a sympathy injury?”
Go figure he did end up fracturing his thumb that same night. On the right hand, no less.
Meanwhile, I had an early morning appointment at school with all the other room moms to learn how to coordinate field trips and classroom parties. About half an hour after the intended 8:30 start time and everyone had finished taking their turns individually standing, introducing themselves, and for an “icebreaker” revealing which Olympic sport they would have played if so gifted – I chose volleyball – the meeting finally, truly commenced.
An hour later it was then time for some “mindless work” as Hans put it, mostly numbering textbooks in the classrooms, starting downstairs in Puck’s and then upstairs in Hans’, while he started sharpening a pile of pencils numbering somewhere south of 400. Sometimes a little mindless work is a good thing. But I still think he called it a day before 50.
When I returned to the boys, they had been busy unpacking a set of Boeing cars, trucks, and planes, another gift from Rose. Puck had been given the difficult task of splitting them fairly between themselves.
“Puck…”
“It’s okay, Mom. We’re being fair. Yali gets most of it. And I get the cool stuff.”
Sometime after dinner and Yali down for the night, Theodore and Gloria back from Nashville, I went outside to watch the storm roll in, high speed. All the cicadas and tree frogs, big wind, thunder, lightning. The best kind of summer evening.
Then Carrie-Bri, Francis, and one of Puck’s pals from church arrived for Olympics and cookie bars. And Skittles for the boys, who were quickly hopping themselves up on sugar.
“We should stop eating Skittles,” Puck said after awhile. “We’re going to regret that.”
We might all regret that.