All in a Day's Think

Puck had been waiting a long impatient 48 hours for his breakfast bowl of cereal. Spontaneously carb-crazy. When the delectable prize finally sat in front of him at the breakfast table, he tried to wait with eyes closed during the prayer. Right before he dug in, spoon in fist, he allowed himself a confession:

“Temptation’s saying, ‘Just get to the point so I can eat the cereal!’”

There’s a lot of that going around these days. If I had a dollar for every time “Temptation” tells him to do something he shouldn’t…

 

Anyway, Puck rallied even further down the road of self-improvement that morning. During our indoor exercise around ten o’clock, he marched back and forth giving me the play-by-play on his upcoming Quiet Hour plans:

“I’m going to clean my room today. That’s what a school child would do.”

He had already made a perfectly groomed bed that morning, hugely proud of himself for tucking up the ends of his Angry Birds comforter so the edges wouldn’t scrape on the floor “where the spiders are.”

Math had been a trip in and of itself. I read aloud his first word problem of the day:

“Shelly had six cherries. Susan ate three of them. How many cherries does Shelly have left?”

Puck’s pencil paused over his notebook. He obviously needed vital clarification on this issue:

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did Susan eat Shelly’s cherries? She was being bad, wasn’t she?”

Then the explanation he gave me for word problem number two: 9 – 5 = 4, even left me head-scratching:

“The answer is five.”

“That’s right. Can you tell me why?”

“Well, you know how four plus four is eight? So you take four away and add one to it and that makes five.”

Bingo.

 

Rain was coming. We left a disappointing game in New York to grab two packages of cookies at Schnuck’s for Friday’s movie night. On the way back Puck concluded to himself, with hand motions in the rearview mirror, that because we lived in the Midwest and there were storms coming from the west and southwest, they would collide with one another and make one huge rainstorm.

 

Back home before that rain, Anna and Eddie brought their young uncle and two more friends to play. The girls were impressed with Puck’s bunk bed and the fruit bowl on the table – requested bananas – but not with Puck’s new collection of cheap colored plastic bags from Ethiopia (packing material in a gift box from the Ryes). He was mildly offended.

Subscribe to Book of Collette

Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
Jamie Larson
Subscribe