A Few Items of Note
Dreaming. Honestly, it’s like punching a ticket to anyplace in the universe for a few hours. Usually more exhausting than relaxing hours, I’ll admit. This time it was a farm near the woods in Australia, outrunning/outlasting thick soft white mist tornadoes in a giant ramshackle conclave of farmhouse and barns. Storm clouds dropping blue poisonous snakes that mostly disappeared when they hit the ground because I decided they just couldn’t be there. No snakes.
Anyway, I found myself sitting in Puck’s Friday morning chapel with Gloria, Mom, El Oso, Rose, and Linnea-Irish a few hours later. Puck read his lines carefully at the microphone from behind a large poster spelling out “Friend”. Then spent his time whispering and grinning with two of his buddies on the top row, while still somehow paying attention as necessary.
Cookies, cinnamon rolls, donuts, Nutella, etc., followed in the conference room before he returned to class. He probably had more sugar on that one paper plate than he had consumed the entire past six months.
Podcasting. Carrie trimmed Francis’ hair while I made him egg sandwiches…
“Why do you guys do that stuff for him?” Dad asked, confounded, coming up from the basement office for leftover cookies.
Puck and I came back to the Big House again after school. He ran into the kitchen for a new request:
“MOM! THEY HAVE THE INCREDIBLE VEGETABLES FROM VEGGIE TALES ON NECKFLICKS! CAN I WATCH IT?!”
Too late. Carrie snagged him.
“First! A hug!”
The one-tooth missing grin obliged. One moderate big squeeze. But then Carrie noticed something amiss.
“Hey!” She patted his stomach. “What happened to your belly? It’s going away.”
The baby fat continues to disappear.
Shortly after El Oso learned that his black Toyota Tacoma had officially and ultimately died, he arrived to pick up Puck for the evening.
Everyone else chowed down on sacks of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches while Rose told us about how she planned to learn the Crip Walk for her company Christmas party. Dad did not approve.
Joe and Rose joined the party. So between the upstairs television (Jane Eyre) and the downstairs for the boys (don’t know what they had on down there), we somehow managed to have the five oldest kids “at home” on a Friday night while the youngest went out socializing.