Boy Things

I hadn’t expected the email that morning passed on from Colombia, asking, “when [do] you want to travel?” At this point in the adoption process, I had assumed we’d eventually receive something that gave us the exact dates we were expected to show up, sometime in September or October. But, no, there it was, sitting in my Inbox. After emailed files, stacks of paper, hours of forms, more emails, phone calls, and texts, I had the next mountain of papers (well, let’s be fair; this stack of papers was more “Appalachian”-worthy) almost ready to go, and we had settled on a suggested departure time of mid/late June.

By the lunch hour, my blood pressure was definitely higher.

Puck’s wasn’t. He came waltzing out of his classroom as usual, ready to tackle the fun of another weekday afternoon.

As we hit the road, I reminded him that movie night had been bumped up one evening.

“Looks like ‘Aladdin’ is next on the list,” I explained.

“I don’t want to watch it.”

“Do you know what it’s about?”

“It probably has romance in it. Romance is girl stuff. I like violence.”

After I explained that it probably didn’t have too much romance in it (to be honest, I didn’t remember that much about it), he agreed to sit for the show, and resumed making ridiculous faces at himself in the rearview mirror.

As we waited in line at the library for “Aladdin”, Puck plunked a new item selection on the counter. “Natural Gas: Opposing Viewpoints”.

“Wow, this looks like some serious reading,” the librarian noted.

Puck felt very important walking out of the library with his pick, reading aloud to himself as he walked.

When we got home, I hit the slab of paperwork again while Puck joined neighbor friends in the street. I heard a potential problem arise when Puck flew through the house to his room and run back outside with something that sounded unnecessary. When I looked out the front door a few minutes later – it’s hard to pause paperwork for some silly reason – thousands of tiny plastic beads in a rainbow of colors coated the driveway and street.

“Puck? … Why did you do that?”

“I thought it would look cool!”

Then came his collection of baseballs, bouncy balls, soccer, kickball, you name it. Before the evening had ended, he sent off two neighbor girls with trash bags of gifted baseballs, while Anna kicked her “new” soccer ball down the street.

“That was nice of you, Puck.”

“Not really, Mom. I wanted to get rid of them.”