A Few Kerfuffles
Monday, December 5, 2011
In which the usual anecdotes swing through a week day…
Puck started the morning off on a roll. He watched both garbage trucks thunder down the street at the same time, more or less racing each other to the end…
“Those are some hot babies!” he declared.
Although he said ‘babies’ more like ‘beh-behs’.
On the way over to the house…
“Mama, I’m down in the dumps.”
And once inside, finding a piece of something glassy…
“Sun! Sun! Is this a diamond? Twinkle, twinkle.”
Back on the ranch…
Joe was leaving for work and then to Elodie-Rose’s apartment where her Internet was being arranged that afternoon.
Troubles were soon to follow…
Crash!
Tears.
Puck had managed to tumble out of his chair at the kitchen table, hitting his head on the corner of the cabinet and his back on something else. Carrie set to work scrambling him a plate of eggs packed with turmeric, an highly effective anti-inflammatory.
But more tears were on the way…
“Francis! Why did you destroy that bouncy ball?” he wailed.
Francis set the fist-sized purple rubber ball on the table, severed in half. Carrie ordered him to purchase a replacement on the way back.
“I got it from Old Navy,” Linnea informed him.
Francis seemed little bothered with this sentence, and begged an egg sandwich for breakfast.
However, Francis and Linnea had recently returned from Walgreen’s for eggs, milk, and another small number of items. And Francis was annoyed with Linnea for taking so long, therefore managing to insult her in the process…
“Alright, Francis,” said Carrie. “You must now say to Linnea, ‘You are beautiful in every single way.’”
“No!”
“Do it, or no egg sandwich.”
“No way!”
“I’m serious.”
Francis mumbled his duty.
So Carrie thumped down a frozen-to-microwave version on the table for his crimes.
Linnea wrinkled her nose, peering down to examine it…
“Did they paint that cheese on?” she asked.
“What! I’m not eating this!” Francis announced.
So while Francis coached Puck into finishing all of the turmeric eggs, successfully, and Linnea chomped a face into her green apple, Collette prepared for Francis his preferred version of the egg sandwich.
And he departed for a four-hour shift shortly after.
Puck was grumpy and tired. So Carrie let him decorate the freshly-baked-for-Dad special Christmas cookies with red sprinkles. Collette heard the endeavor from the other room as Carrie tried to prevent the overspill…
“Oh my. Yes. Well. OK, Puck. Yeah. A little less… Oh wow. Yeah, um. Let’s have you… OK, uh, yeah…”
“I made a mountain of sugar!”
Giggle, giggle.
Mom and Dad returned by one o’clock from their visit to Branson and northern Arkansas just in time for Mom to accompany Carrie and Linnea to their doctor appointments. But not before Earnest was brought out to display his recent entanglement with the candle flame…
“What a hare-rowing experience!” Mom teased.
And Puck was loaned a miniature Spanish church from Peru by Dad from his office, which he pondered carefully…
“It’s a spiders’ church,” Puck said carefully. “All the spiders go in there to worship their spider god. We should tell them not to go there again.”
When he returned the church some time later, he emerged from the basement with a blue nose and a grin…
“Grandpa chalked my nose like a cue stick!”
After Puck had completed his lessons for the day, the girls returned.
“So what did he say about your back?” Collette asked Linnea.
Linnea grinned…
“He was impressed with my cracking skills.”
Francis came back with three glow-in-the-dark balls for Puck.
Then Linnea got busy in a phone conversation with Eleda while Dad, Mom, and Carrie-Bri headed out to Rose’s and Whole Foods.
And Francis and Linnea argued about cheese and other things.
OLeif did a swing-by pick-up on the way home in order to Skype about tech stuff at church by six.
A brief jewel hunt for Puck in Collette’s dwindling jewelry box.
And a cat was mewing obnoxiously outside somewhere.