Ch. 175; Vol. 10
Five and a half hours later…
up.
I forgot to put Crackers in the basement overnight, and she was loudly demanding breakfast. I think Puck has been reading her too much Garfield.
“CAN I PLAY MINECRAFT TODAY, MOM?! CAN I NOT DO SCHOOL TODAY?!?!”
This is the Calvin greeting I received when I walked in the front door of the Silverspoon house about two hours later. What can you do.
Puck had just completed a leisurely breakfast over stacks of real-to-life Minecraft wood blocks on the kitchen counter, including one wood box on the floor in which he had spelled out the word “TV” with more blocks. He was pretty proud of that whole “TV” thing, so Gloria took a picture of it.
The drive home was about 40% discussing poor school attitude, 2% silence, another 4% volunteered apologies, and then about 54% questions…
“Mom? What if the sun reflected back to Erf [Earth] and then it got reflected back up to the sun. Would it explode?”
“That would be an interesting idea, but it doesn’t exactly work that way… We don’t have a giant mirror here either… But you could ask Sun and Grandpa more about that. They both know a lot about space.”
He then wanted to know, of course, who knew more about it: Sun or Grandpa. Then, as a green and watermelon shaded car zoomed around us…
“Mom, wouldn’t it be cool if I spawned-ed Dad’s work to our house so he could walk to work every day and then we could see him all the time?”
– Breaks your heart. –
“Sun could use her magic to make a magic wand to do that.”
The next few seconds, about three pronounced dimples were giggling uproariously in my rearview window because Puck has somehow figured out how to successfully tickle himself… Something about “chubby bones” and I don’t know what he was talking about…
“HEE-HEE-HEE!!! HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE!!!”
When we walked back in the door to a sprawling Crackers and a tired hard-working Bear in the office – leaving shortly for lunch and then the rest of the work day in Clayton – Puck had new ideas. While I unpacked his overnight bag and stacked his school books for the morning, he could see that I was already pretty tired, and gathered some supplies from the basement and coat closet…
“Well, Mom, do you want me to make a robot out of this seat so it can do all your chores?”
“That would be pretty cool…”
The backrest of the swiveling office chair in the basement, The Bear’s no-longer-used camera tripod, and collapsable music stand. These articles he began to unpack and contemplate as to their various uses in his robot design. But Phonics waits for no man, and aside from his earlier protests, Puck – as usual – completely forgot to be grumpy about actually sitting down for “school” and began to mark vowels, which eventually became less macrons and breves and more… faces… with goofy eyeballs, mustaches, and…
“Look. Curly eyelashes. Let me give it some more curlies.”
– Giggle, giggle, giggle. –
“Look, Mom! That one’s supposed to be DAD!”
Lunch had wrapped up. I was getting a second wind after cleaning up the house, laundry, scrubbing the stove top, unpacking from the last ten days being mostly gone. Puck took a pit stop, stashing Crackers in a dry shower while he was at it, because he doesn’t like being parted from his little beloved creature for more than a few minutes. Followed by…
“MOM! COULD YOU BRING ME SOME LEGOS AND SOME GARFIELD AND ALL MY CALVIN AND HOBBES!!!! ALL MY CALVIN AND HOBBES!!!!”
Puck had changed his tune by three o’clock that afternoon when suddenly math was not moving as quickly as usual…
“Once I’m President I’m going to STOMP SCHOOL TO PIECES!!”
Then he forgot about it a few minutes later…
“Shaleek a look a leesh a look galeek. A loo-k a lish loosh lahk rish rish aloosh. Shaleesh a leek a leek.”
“What?”
“I speak a different language.”
When The Bear walked in the door that evening to find Puck in the resolved muscle man shirt substituting as pajamas, the rough housing, wrestling, and tickling had begun.
With gusto.