March 26th, 2025
While Oxbear and Yali are at an appointment in South County... Yali lamenting a busted knee from smashing it into a fence or something the previous afternoon... “That's it... I'm going to die and go to Heaven!” is his official prognosis...
...Puck walks out to Patience sitting at the breakfast table with a math sheet... he swipes her new calculator to take a better look... “Puck, put that back... you don't need your sister's pink non-scientific calculator...” // He grins... “I didn't take it... the dog did” … he and Patience then begin to argue about things like wrestling and what constitutes a baby vs. a toddler... “I have better coloring skills than you do, Puck...” Patience randomly tells him... “Mooooom! Grumpy's folding my math paper into a paper airplane!”
An hour later Patience and I are back up at KDS where I collate test papers while Patience helps arrange and supervise a pack of “spicy little nachos” as her former Spanish teacher labels the feisty preschoolers that morning...
Back home during lunch it's Yali's turn for mathematics, while I spend nearly half an hour working on paying one of his medical bills over the phone... after listening to this conversation finally end – Yali – spinning up a huge pile of spaghetti with his fork, as if summarizing the whole thing for me, says calmly,... “Do you know I pay taxes?” … He then begins to carefully scratch out half the nouns in his next math word problem, replacing each of them with the word “poop”...
Meanwhile Patience is painting her nails a shiny shade of violet before leaving for the studio...
Cut to after six o'clock and Oxbear and Yali are leaving for a den meeting with the Scouts...
...while Puck is texting me from work not to pick up one of the thyme plants in the produce section, which I wasn't going to do anyway because they looked so sad and mostly dead... but we do grab a dragon fruit for Patience...
Then home for cheddar and beef sausages in rolls and chocolate-stuffed pastries for a quick girls' evening while Patience watches one of her favorite Youtube channels – “The Family Fudge” – and I sit with her and catch up on the old laptop...
Everyone back home together again after eight-thirty... including stories from Yali about hanging out with a yellow boa constrictor in the gym at his Scout meeting...