01 DEC 25
Morning opens with one child moping across my bed in rollerblades and a wounded spirit...
...another wrapped in slashed shirts soaked in fake blood...
...and another waiting for church sausage and eggs over easy for breakfast...
...as Yali and Patience begin slowly pressing into my airspace side-by-side with questions and questions and questions like hungry question zombies in a horror film...
So I get busy down in the kitchen as I hear Yali advising his sister from the other room...
“PATIENCE there's an easier way to get SICK! Just drink toilet water and eat expired MEAT!”...
With Oxbear off work for the day... he takes the kids shopping before the weather shifts...
...as Patience begins to imagine aloud what she'd look like as a full blonde...
...while I'm helping Puck clean up another mess of cat in his room... the cat is banished to the basement for all of two minutes before Puck lovingly allows the rascal to return to the warm and golden refuge of his room...
A soft snow begins to fall around the lunch hour... what begins as nothing more harmless than a snowglobe quickly tumbles into the sibling group text blowing up with traffic reports of apocalyptic nature... including B's unit responding to a 30-vehicle wreck as highways worsen to delays of hours...
Sally even waits it out with us for awhile in the late afternoon while driving home south from work...
...as Yali and Patience take turns sliding on the saucer sled across and off of the trampoline...
Sally scoots back to the dogs and chickens before dinner... hot bowls of chili mac all around for the fam...
And Oxbear crafts a canopy from twine and sheets and thumbtacks over Patience's bunk... which is no longer a bunkbed... because she's feeling uncomfortable exposed to the ceiling for the first time in about seven years...
...while Yali rages around looking for band-aids in a now-personal-vendetta against the wicker laundry basket because he stubbed and cut his toe on it... three or four band-aids later and he's ready for bed too in another quiet snowy night...