Divide and Conquer

Puck sat on a folding chair next to me in the school gym, keeping one eye on Heidi’s basketball game, the other on a wad of gray sculpting clay in his hands that he was busy fashioning into a bazooka gun. Always has to be creating something, just like his dad.

After the game I saw him chasing a quarter around the gym on his hands and knees, inadvertently dusting the floor with his green Minecraft hoodie.

On our drive home, Puck had more thoughts for me.

“Mom? I have a question that my teacher didn’t answer this week. I know gravity won’t let me jump very high. But can I jump higher when the sun is out and not jump as high at night?”

This was an interesting thought which we didn’t have time to finish discussing because Target was waiting for Puck with a brand new pair of green and blue track shoes.

We left with more than that, though. Puck had some allowance and decided to spend part of it on another Diamond Dig.

“One out of every 24 boxes has a diamond in it,” he told one of the mom-customers in the aisles.

“I’ll keep doing these until I find a diamond in one of them,” he told me on the drive home. “Well, until I’m 63.”

Much later in the day I returned from the store with more bananas. Always more bananas. We raised two monkeys. I’m always picking up discarded peels. Eventually they meandered into our room, each peeling a piece of these prized fruits.

“Yali is the prince of bananas,” Puck announced. “And I am the KING of bananas.”

Or, “noognas” as Yali still tends to call them.

“Finish your noognas, Yali,” Puck encouraged him. “Finish your noognas!”

We had a movie night after dinner for the boys – “The Road to El Dorado”. Puck observed Disney’s cartoon portrayal of Aztec natives for a few minutes, then asked me, “Did they believe in Christ?”