Come Back on a Real Week Day

Mom and Carrie-Bri walked through the front door, a wave of shivering air behind them. With the Big House washer decommissioned, and another one not due in until the following Tuesday, the laundry was piling up.

Got some work done and caught up on things. Only two days, but enough seems to happen in two days that it qualifies as “catching up”. Part of that catching up included the fact that “color stripper” had not been 100% effective on Linnea’s blue “Halloween” hair.

We shared fish tacos and Irish grilled cheese while the clothes dryer spun a couple of cycles in the basement before Mom and Carrie drove home. A winter weather advisory was on its way soon.

Sniff, sniff.

Puck held a line of recently de-socked toes against his nose. “My feet smell like vinegar. … My feet are vinegar. … And I don’t even eat vinegar!”

Finally conscious of the strong odor his feet tend to present to the world, I assured him that another foot bath would temporarily stem the tide, so to speak. A vinegary tide, apparently.

This was after school, during homework.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about this week in particular with Puck, it’s his newly-developed love of inserting the word “butt” into every other sentence. (Although he insisted that he wouldn’t do so in public.) And then when I explained the proper medical term for the word, he adopted “buttocks” instead. Buttocks this, buttocks that.

“Mom, what would happen if instead of our eyes, we had little buttocks as eyes?”

“Mom, what if our heads had buttocks on top of them? Eew, that would be gross.”

“Mom, buttocks is a funny word. Like ‘butt’ and an ‘ox’ together.”

He is 100% boy.

Home to beat the freezing rain, the sleet, and the snow. Puck was up to his nose in Legos while I tried to piece together dinner of quesadillas over a stack of papers that sometimes feels endless.

When Oxbear walked through the door with chocolate truffles and sparkling red grape juice, he arrived between waves of sleet and the ongoing sibling group-text warning each other to get home, keep off the roads, and pick each other up if necessary.