Goofballs

I caught Puck in the act, peeling the wrapper off a yogurt pop from the freezer after breakfast.

“Puck…”

Clearly he already had a speech prepared. “But, Mom! It’s pure yogurt! It’s completely yogurt! It says 100% yogurt on the box!”

“That’s what it says, but they usually still put other stuff in there.”

Puck practically scoffed at me. “Mom, they only did that in the 80s!”

After school, about seven or eight kids terrorized Mr. V’s 2nd Grade classroom, rolling around on the ground, shoes flying through the air, paper airplanes, wrestling matches. I’ve come to realize that my lack of height doesn’t exactly make a compelling case for my parental authority.

Eventually Mr. V wrapped up the party with a, “Let’s make like a tree and get out of here.”

I guess Puck was sort of listening, because as soon as he buckled himself into the car, he said to me all cool like, “Let’s make like a tree and leaf.”

Close…

Back home, in one room, Yali must have been getting a little anxious for dinner. He found a stack of disposable plastic plates, set them in a circle on the floor, and held up two folded hands asking me to pray for his air meal.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how it came up, but in the other room Puck had some thoughts on why he had been so well-behaved, relatively speaking, back in 2nd grade. “Um… have you seen Mr. V’s six-pack? He’s the biggest teacher in the building!”

Then Oxbear called me into the hallway. “Um, Collette? Did you teach Yali to do this? He’s blowing his nose in my beard!”

“What? How could I have taught him how to do that?”

“Oh, I have to tell you,” Oxbear grinned, always ready to share a good beard story. “When I was at the store today, the clerk looked at me and said, ‘Strong beard game, brother.’”

So with one circus concluding, it was eight o’clock, and half the Snicketts kids walked through the front door. Rose was at a church trivia night. Jaya was playing at Carnegie over the weekend. And Irish was at work. Meanwhile, Francis was proudly sporting his new Rec-Plex Sharks swim team coach pullover, the 21 year-old taskmaster who has been known to accidentally give out his birth year as 1973 and occasionally says things like, “I can dig it.”

Then we watched a 1983 nuclear holocaust film over trays of Carrie’s homemade spanakopita. Weirdos.