Chapter Seventeen
6:50 and I’m awake, but I don’t get up yet. I’ve just come back from a modern German hotel. Everything was bright and whiter than I’m used to in my dreams. But I can’t linger; I wake the boys and scrub out the hall bath, put away dishes, boil water in the kettle for Puck’s oatmeal. Kirsten is coming to inspect the house and review our home study biography. She will bring a practicum student.
Puck and I pick up Linnea before ten; she’s my babysitter for the morning. She and I reminisce on the ride back – old days with the English kids. Hours walking the woods, no one knowing where we were. Once, Linnea says, she and Eleda walked through the dark early in the morning and lit a fire for breakfast. A cranky farmer told them off his land until he realized they weren’t harming anything. Except for the fire…
I sense Puck is going to be wild. As soon as we walk in the door, he chases Crackers across our comforter. In his boots. Then he climbs up the shelves of the linen closet to grab something, I don’t know what, before I pull him down. He knows company is coming to talk about his baby brother. He can’t contain the excitement. Even if he doesn’t realize it. Fortunately, he behaves well. He and Linnea retreat to the basement after he sweetly greets the ladies and shows them his pretty scared cat. The meeting passes quickly. A little under 90 minutes. Kirsten scratches rapidly over yellow legal pad. She asks the questions she’s supposed to ask, but she also talks just to talk, see how we are, explains how things are going. But I feel like I should have added more information to the paperwork. Like how, even though Dad reaps the genetic codes of thyroid and cholesterol malfunction, he still runs six miles every other day and is very healthy, actually. But I don’t think employees of ICBF really care about Dad’s exercise routine. I hear clattering and thumping from the basement. Rubber balls, rockets, space shuttles…
“Did you hear him yelling stuff about poison?” Linnea asks me later.
“No… What?…”
“He was warning me about the bug spray on the shelf.”
I wonder if Kirsten heard him say it.
“Let me treat you all to lunch,” says The Bear, before Kirsten and the practicum student even slip back into the red Honda CR-V, or something similar.
It’s a short drive down the road to Chick-fil-A, and back for “Little House”. A thin cardboard box sits on the wedge of brick by the front door. The wedge that is loose and crumbly a little on the edges. Puck’s name is printed on the label. He eagerly pulls the tab and lifts out a plastic tube. I already guess who sent it. Inside the tube is a robot bug that scuttles rapidly across the floor, like the head of a toothbrush. Puck loves it. Of course it’s from Carrie, delivered next day. He can’t get through lunch without splashing half a bottle of water over the floor, of course. But he’s trying. He’s exploring, he’s a leader, he’s, enthusiastic, he’s caring, he’s independent, he’s inquisitive, creative, eager, helpful. And even though he can drive me crazy with the endless endlessness of exploring too much, exerting independence too much, questioning too much… I’m glad he’s like this. And I’m proud of him for being polite and staying in the basement for 90 minutes while the adults talked.
Then plant shopping. Carrie sent me a list of house plants that improve air quality of the home, according to NASA. We don’t find any of them available at Lowe’s, but wedged in the beautiful sprays of white orchids and cactus coral are two specimens that look right. I lift a “ponytail palm” off the top shelf. And a “croton” – ruffled leaves of red, orange, yellow, green, and dark purple.
“You should name them,” Linnea tells me, balancing the fraternal twins in her lap.
“You name one, Puck. And Linnea can name the other. Which one do you want to name?”
“That one,” he points to the ponytail. “I’ll name it… Ballerina?”
The delicate frills seem compatible with the christening.
“Linnea?”
She has the one with colors…
“Hmmm… Red… Red Beard.”
We present Ballerina and Red Beard to Mom a few minutes later. She’s just up from resting with a blanket on the couch. Carrie is at work. Francis is at work. Joe is asleep after a long night.
“Thank you for introducing me to the newest members of your family,” Mom laughs as we leave.
Of course it’s not until I set Red Beard in the mid-afternoon sunlight of book stacks at the window that I read online: “toxic to cats”. I sigh a little. Figures. Maybe Red Beard won’t mind a plastic cube house. It’s already four o’clock by the time I write up another ten skeins of French and English hum-drums, but I’m not hungry enough to make dinner yet. Crackers investigates Ballerina. Twenty seconds and she takes a crack at one of the curly leaves.
“No,” I reprimand.
She stops obediently and digs her head further into the permed branches. Sniffs the rocks. I know I should check Puck’s room – see what all that thumping and banging and crashing was during the past hour, but I don’t really want to. Crackers is attacking the plant now, taking a few swipes. She senses competition. Thinks she’s a jungle beast. I decide to read to Puck. We’re one-third of the way through a library book about president’s mothers. It’s already dark. The sun has pushed through dirty gray cloud patches all day, but finally had enough, and sank. The Bear works through dinner to make up for the morning’s meeting and then leaves for Guys’ Night. There has to be a better name for it, but there hasn’t been yet. So Puck and I sit on the couch with projects. Sewing bags. Cloth. Glass jars of pens and markers. I fashion a lap loom out of the cardboard Amazon box that held the robot bug, a handful of clear thumbtacks, and a roll of bubble gum pink string that Puck brought back from Mom’s and Dad’s. I fooled around with that thing back in high school; projects I never figured out. I weave four or five rows. Then Rose calls. It’s already seven o’clock. Puck’s bed time. And I’m kind of worn out myself. Even though Puck is not, proof in the amount of time it takes to get him ready for bed. But he calms down quick. I flip on the John Piper sermon The Bear encouraged me to listen to. It’s about parenting. For the Glory of God.