All in a Tuesday

Somewhere around six o’clock in the morning, Yali pulled me out of a dream where I was making arrowheads, and whined to watch videos on my phone. This is usually how every day begins.

At breakfast, Puck devoured Round One, and requested a clementine as follow-up.

“Uh, Mom? What is that?” he pointed to a brown bruise. “It looks like an eye.”

“It’s okay. It’s probably just on the peel.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Can you peel this for me, Mom? I’m uncomfortable peeling oranges that look like they have eyes.”

After this, Puck and I got on the road, so I could watch the school office during staff meeting. The worst thing I had to encounter that hour was re-bandaging a boy with an oozing elbow wound which was festering pretty badly. Fortunately for him, I’d seen my share of wounds in my time with two brothers and three tom-boy sisters. Fortunately for me, there was minimal blood involved.

Puck and Heidi got busy on their homework shortly after carpool ended that afternoon. They set up a dividing wall with a whiteboard on wheels in the conference room, and cracked open the math textbooks, the goldfish crackers, the peanut butter sandwich crackers, and the fruit snacks.

As the hour progressed, little by little, the whiteboard moved closer and closer towards Heidi’s side of the table until she had closed herself into the corner.

“It’s my secret lair!” she declared happily, before coaxing Yali to join her in the “restricted area”.

Meanwhile, Mom was back from Germany. With a cuckoo clock. Puck was eager to learn about his own gifts, so he gave her a ring while I made dinner.

“Grandma? Can you tell me if my gift is made of plastic?”

“No, there’s no plastic in the gift,” she laughed.

“Can you tell me the materials it’s made out of?”

And later…

“Can you tell me if the gift is smaller than an inch?”

“It’s bigger than an inch.”

“So is it bigger than a foot?”

But finally Puck came to the conclusion that, “Wow, Grandma. You’ve really got me stumped!” He chuckled.