Fun with Cousins

Puck began his morning with the broom, as usual.
“Cwean, cwean!” he sang out, marching through the kitchen toward the living room. “Move! Move!” he called in advance, before he might run over his mom in the process.
Then Collette scooched his Cardinal’s knit hat over his head, which sometimes gave him the appearance of being a chubby little pharaoh with a red and white pharaoh crown.
Over at the house, Joe’s giant charcoal drawings were spread out on the dining room table. Most of the table was also covered in black, white, and gray charcoal smudges. He was working on what appeared to be a white moon in night mists.
Carrie plopped the Puck up on the kitchen counter and began to make banana bread. Puck thought this was very interesting as he helped mash the banana.
“Sugar…” Carrie told him. “You don’t know what that is, chubby. But it’s good stuff.”
Puck smiled, and proceeded to ask for “suuuuugar,” whenever Carrie brought another ingredient to the mixing bowl.
Then, while Troops waited for handouts, Puck called to him from the counter, “Trooper get it. Trooper get it. Trooper, no, no, no, no, no.”
While the banana bread baked, Puck helped Carrie practice tribal fusion.
Joe, who was on spring break, sauntered upstairs at around nine-thirty to make a small pot of coffee. He was screeching out an obnoxious tune…
“Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a wish,
“Find me a cow, find me a match.
“Playing with needles I’d stab my fingers!
“So make me a perfect match!”
Meanwhile, Collette had to stop Francis from glueing his math notebook pages together.
“It doesn’t matter,” he protested. “Ellen wrote all that stuff in there. Not me.”
Later in the afternoon, while Puck napped, Collette and Joe ran some errands. This included Office Depot for Collette to run photo copies of several Iceland travel books (where they also saw Bluebell, rushing around for the madrigal dinner), Hobby Lobby (for Joe to purchase wind chimes and a giant permanent marker for his class projects), and then Dierbergs, where Collette stocked up on a few supplies for Rose, who would be house-sitting for them.
“I just couldn’t resist,” said Joe, putting a Naked juice in the basket. “They’re the best ever.”
Three pounds of fruit in one drink. Three and a half apples, one-half banana, four strawberries, five blackberries, and four raspberries.
For the latter part of the afternoon, everyone spilled outdoors into the sunshine. Carrie with her Spanish, trying to soak up a bit of a tan. Mom with a scissors to snip at the dead brown of the grass bush. Linnea and Puck to dig in the dirt after Collette and Linnea buzzed through the neighborhood on bikes. Joe and Rose were at work. And Francis was enjoying his own bike ride far and away somewhere. Collette wasn’t quite certain.
Afterward, Mom prepared Caesar chicken wraps and football bean dip (refried beans, sour cream with taco seasoning, miracle whip, and cheddar cheese) for dinner, just as Dad was returning in time for the kids’ basketball “awards ceremony”, which Carrie insisted wasn’t an awards ceremony at all.
“They don’t actually hand out awards,” she said. “It’s just really loud. They have a sermon. And then the cheerleaders give a routine and hope they don’t fall off the stage.”
It wasn’t long later that OLeif joined Collette and Puck on a ride to the Silverspoon’s to see Scarlett and the boys one more time before their return trip to Texas.
Gabriel and Michael were ready to play, despite having just returned from an all-day at the City Museum, the Arch, and Pizza Street.
“I had fifteen pizzas!” Gabriel announced.
They quickly joined Theodore, Gloria, and Puck out in the backyard, dropping themselves inside the deep holes where the deck posts had once stood and running around the yard with Sebastian. Then Gabriel began turning flips until it was time for Puck to go inside for his bath.
Gabriel and Michael talked with Collette while Puck splashed in the bubbles, about football, slumber parties, and other things. And the blue-eyed Michael squirted two bottles of hand sanitizer on Puck to show him how to wash his hands, and then added a small suitcase of his toys to the bath for Puck to play with.
After smoked turkey sandwiches and turkey, it was finally time to call it a day, after reassurances from Scarlett that they would not wait as long to visit again.