Last Lazy Days

The last snip of typical night-long dreams: picking up bake-your-own New York style pizzas and boxed cheesecakes with Joe, Mom, and the girls someplace in a sunny city, maybe on the West coast. I don’t have food dreams very often. Especially not about cheesecake.

“How does a pregnant woman have fun?”

What sounded like the premise for a bad joke was an honest question Puck had to ask me after breakfast this morning, sitting on his Strider bike above the kitchen linoleum. I didn’t have an answer for him.

Puck was having trouble staying in his room during Quiet Hour. As usual. At one point he came in with a white wire hanger that he had twisted into what I guessed was a swan. Wrong.

“It’s one of those flying dinosaurs.”

Get with the program, Mom.

Puck was having a rough afternoon. Shopping to the faint strains of The Black Eyed Peas, Puck had done well helping me collect groceries. Added his cold pomegranate juice to the stash. However, back-talk at the check-out did him in. As we left the store, I shared the news with him that, due to his actions, he would not be allowed to play with Anna and Eddie when we returned. He held back tears.

“I wish I never existed.” Then a little louder, just to make sure I had heard him. “I wish I never existed.”

Then he got over it.

Caught a fuzzy game on the laptop at 6:10. The pterodactyl hanger was sitting on the floor from some mishap flight. Puck meticulously penciled shingles onto a three-towered house on printer paper.

“This is Adam Wainwright’s house,” he explained after awhile, and pointed to a smiling stick figure with a red ball cap standing on the lawn. “I want to send it to him.”

And sure, why not. Nothing a forty-nine-cent stamp can’t take care of.