50 : Getting Ready

“Mom?”

“Yes, son.”

“Can I have those twenty dollars Grandma found on our walk last week?”

“I’m still thinking about it. I’m afraid you’ll lose it, even if you keep it in your wallet.”

Puck looked at me carefully. “Mom. I’m probably the most sophisticated person to not lose their wallet, EVER.”

I had to finish organizing the house before the realtor arrived that evening for an updated inspection. Between that and painting door frames, Yali decided to plaster my Matheny t-shirt with stickers while I moved around the house. His birthday stickers.

After that, the boys took an early morning – muggy morning – bike break. Two minutes in, and Yali took a spill on the porch. Double-bloody nose. A good opportunity to break in those “Cars” band-aids from Grandma. Truth be told, by the end of the day, he had harvested about seven of those band-aids for various legitimate – and imaginary – wounds.

The afternoon was waning. Already the boys had finished off almost all the raspberries and blueberries intended to be rationed throughout the entire week.

Then while I kept painting door frames, Yali decided to lean against one of them – paint streaks on the back of his eagle birthday t-shirt. Fortunately the color mostly blended in. But Yali was very upset. So Puck let him join him on the top bunk, where they had a little chat. I listened while I kept painting.

“Now, Yali, listen. Listen to me. I know you’re having a hard day. AND you’re being potty-trained. But I believe in one thing. If you had come to me when I called you, you wouldn’t have got paint on your shirt. Come to me when I say. Come to me when I say, okay? … WEDGIE!”

Puck was handling the situation well enough that I offered him a proposition on those twenty dollars. If he watched Yali for me throughout the rest of the afternoon so I could finish preparing the house, he could earn those twenty dollars in baby-sitting fees.

Nice timing. That’s around the time power inexplicably went out in a third of the house.

“You need a new meter base,” the utility man with a giant gray handlebar mustache drawled as we stood staring at the side of the house in the heat. “It’s gettin’ all burned up.”

Always something.