At-Home Thursdays
It was a quiet one at the little house all day. Not much going on, a cool gray-skies morning, billowing honeysuckle, and more schoolbooks.
By the time Anna and Eddie exited their respective buses late in the afternoon, Puck went bounding down the street skipping in his blue flip-flops. I could hear them coming up the driveway, neighbor dogs barking out loud greetings:
“Stupid dog!” Anna yelled at it, clearly annoyed with the loudness of the canines.
“It’s not stupid,” Puck chastised her. “It’s just a normal living thing.”
So while Eddie introduced Puck to a brand new concept – Pokemon; we’ll see if that catches on like Legos – Anna lugged her huge pink school binder inside to chat with me at the kitchen table.
“So, what are you doing?” she asked, behind her dark pink eyeglasses. She likes to ask me this often.
“Oh, just catching up on stuff. I was filling out papers for the adoption and learning more Spanish…”
“Oh, because Calvin’s brother will speak Spanish so you’re learning how to speak it and he’ll learn English?”
This six year-old doesn’t miss a beat. Then she showed me two green Sharpie marks on her arm, an incident at school.
Tears followed meatballs at dinner. Puck, my perfectionist – in many cases – Puck, decided to draw a bar of Minecraft gold on his giant paper roll. Fountains of tears accompanied every imperfect sketch. I’m not the pampering type, I’m afraid, so I sent him back to try again. About six attempts later, he returned with the finished product, and I had to admit that it looked pretty close to the “real” thing.
“We think Minecraft gold looks like butter,” he explained. “THE POWER OF BUTTER!”
I sent him outside to play with Eddie before bedtime.
“No playing inside,” I told him. “Get some fresh air. It’s a nice evening. Stay outside; got it?”
I guess sitting on Eddie’s porch watching video clips on a Nook somehow constitutes as “playing outside.” We had definitions.
While El Oso joined the men’s prayer group somewhere in the sprawling suburbs, I worked my way through a bag of Sun Chips tabbing back and forth between the game in Kansas City and the MLB Draft.
Anyway, we’ve had some quiet days.