Dance dance dance week
Wake from dreams... flooding in the city... kids dump themselves back on our bed... Patience is an explosion of entrepreneurial plans and begins chatting about a lemonade stand and selling t-shirts... before I've even left my room for the morning she's prepared two t-shirt design prototypes for a clothing line she's titled : “Bad Panda”... “I want to earn money so I can save up to buy some Nike shoes...” she explains with great confidence...
Meanwhile Yali is busy creating stories and scenarios... “Mom? What would you do if there was a box sitting outside the door and it said DANGER WARNING on it? What would you do?” // “Well... I don't think I would open it...” // “And what if it was filled with baby turtles?” // “Well...”
But Patience has already cut back into the conversation, carrying a cardboard box of magic markers upstairs from her desk to make lemonade stand signs...
And Yali decides he wants an omelets for breakfast, so we work on that in the kitchen before hitting workbooks for the morning...
After a few stops and appointments over the next several hours, Yali is home in the warming sunshine intensely patrolling the yard with his Elvish sword and cape, apparently goblin-hunting... the battle is so intense he ends it with a small blood blister on his right hand which he insists requires bandaging...
Meanwhile Puck is blending chocolate peanut butter banana protein shakes in the kitchen, discussing work-out plan ideas with me...
The foil pan of dry cement containing Oxbear's 3D-printed violin shell has been moved to the oven at 400° where it continues to cure...
And Yali has transitioned to chasing his sister around the yard with a flyswatter wearing a chicken headdress...
Before dropping Puck off at work for another shift, help the kids collect childhood books for their poetry class at Yellow Bird tomorrow and take them on a short walk in the neighborhood at their begging...
With Puck stocking radishes and fennel (or whatever they've reserved for him to curate that afternoon)...
...Patience opens the front door carrying a plastic measuring cup... announces – less than two hours till show time – “I'm going to make some mud now!”...
...she joins Yali in the front would-be landscaping for what Yali has entitled “A Jurassic Disaster” amongst the not-yet-bloomed daffodils... arranged with mud, puddles, muddy puddles, and a portion of his somewhat massive dinosaur collection...
Their pleasantries soon shed away for fights over Nutella and marshmallows...
While Oxbear is scrubbing that 3D-print violin out of the hot cement – which somehow looks as if it's been siting at the bottom of the sea for 200 years – he remembers he's supposed to be at a school board meeting and scoots out the door just in time...
Up goes Patience's hair back into the wig as Yali announces loudly that yet another wooden floor vent has collapsed into pieces like a jigsaw in his hands... “I TRIED TO FIX IT!”
Almost time to leave... Patience – who already has “wig-ache” – begins taping her hard shoes as Yali walks by and decides it's a prime time to begin smacking a small cardboard box on his sister's embroidered crown...
Down to Aberdeen Heights Senior Living in Kirkwood by six-thirty for Patience's 6th performance of the St. Pat's season... Yali is not happy to accompany and makes no attempt to hide his displeasure, until... one of the other dance-brothers walks by... and sandwiched between the loudness and chaos and whirling of practice and performing, Yali finds a new friend – a friend with the exact name as one of my lawyer cousins – to share all his Dummy 13s with, and later sends home this new buddy with two Dummy 13s of his own... “I had a great time!” he crows as we leave for home...
Back before eight-thirty to the big boys... set up a plate of pork steak, fries, and fresh cucumber wedges for the young working man tediously gluing all those tiny mirrors on that welding helmet... and prepare for more crazy tomorrow...