April 23rd
Roseorange glow in the east is just fading into morning as Yali is in the kitchen microwaving a chimichanga for breakfast... “Mom? Can I go lizard hunting?” // “Sure... Who ate all the Hershey's? Where is the dog?” …nosing her snout through the empty bag of Hershey's treasures apparently... everyone (including the dog) feigns innocence...
Meanwhile Oxbear is rocking out a little to what he calls “Club Gospel” (which apparently is now a sub-genre of Gospel) in his little closet office before joining his first online meeting of the day... this is after he and Yali spend some time testing out the new 3D-printed glow-in-the-dark lightsabers for cousin T...
An hour later Patience and I are back in the Spanish classroom where Patience receives a little beaded charm bracelet with the patron saint of the church in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico from C.P. in thanks for all her service this year...
Shortly later the St. Louis Blues mascot – Louie – blows through the common area with his entourage while I mark First Grade math sheets... the Blues have made the playoffs and schools around town are celebrating...
Two and a half hours of good work later... Patience and I briefly stop at home for lunch before... orthodontist for a new bracket and lavender bands... not unlike the color of all the wisteria suddenly gone wild in the suburban woods that we pass on the drive home... as Patience shares with me all the reasons she doesn't like our house... “A. It's embarrassing...” (mostly – apparently – because we have no swimming pool)... // I confess I completely miss what B. and C. are... // “...and D. There's so many holes!” …that last one might be a little true... boys and drywall don't always play nicely together...
Back for notebooks and dishes... where Yali is waiting for us with newly 3D-printed black horror-film practically lethal claws like jumbo Bugles chips one for each finger... he's busy practicing spookily tapping them around hallway corners while Patience practices determining the length of various perimeters on her math sheet...
Puck pauses from cat time – which is mostly him trying to contain the incredible amount of golden fluff that his cat produces constantly... no matter whether it's actually “shedding season” or not – to hang out with the kids and generally distract them from whatever they're supposed to be doing (which they of course love and promote as hard as possible)... “Here” Puck hands a mostly-empty bag of protein powder to Yali with a “sly grin”... “go put this in the dog's water bowl”...
Fast forward to late afternoon where Patience and I drive out to the studio for another class... still skipping over the kind of potholes where you can feel the car die a little every time it hits one...
While Patience dances “set” for an hour... Civic windows rolled down to cooling breezes from an almost-80 day... Carrie-Bri texts the sibling group photograph evidence of how baby S habitually sleeps arms-crossed mummy-style “channeling” the family's purported ancient Egyptian line...
And home once again in the early evening to bookend Yali's day of vaguely Latin American cuisine with a plate of hand-packed burritos...
Watery sun sinking in the west...