Enjoying that Goulash?

“MOM! A TOAST JUST POPPED UP IN THE TOASTER AND I REALLY WANT TO DEVOUR IT!” Puck yelled from the kitchen to the back room.

I allowed it. Thirty seconds later, he walked back to find me.

“Uh, Mom? You know the little toast that you cooked?”

He held up the piece in question, toasted about a shade darker than he was accustomed to eating.

“Should I cook it a little longer?” he teased.

After church, we celebrated Elmer’s and Jaya’s 28th and 26th birthdays, respectively, over lunch. Carrie-Bri had also made a large chocolate chip cookie. A pattern of bunnies and a heart had been dusted on the top with powdered sugar.

“Elmer and Jaya never told me what they wanted for dessert,” she explained. “So I asked the bunnies.”

During the meal, the majority of the family found it necessary to discuss things like dysentery, and the one time an old buddy of Elmer’s drank out of a rancid puddle someplace in the wilderness and felt the effects of it for about a year.

Oxbear nudged me during the middle of this conversation. “Mmm… enjoying that goulash?”

Anyway, there was a bonfire after the meal and gifts, which included things like dark chocolate and ladderball for Jaya, and a new bike helmet for Elmer. Just enough time for the boys – Francis, Puck, and Yali – to burn through a pile of cardboard boxes before it was time to leave at four o’clock to prepare a new school week.

Countdown till moving: 6 days.