Mis Hijos Locos
I checked the clock on my phone. 3:11AM. This time I woke from being chased by a pretty intense squad of Maori warriors. I had just made it to the river at night, to cross, but they were too close. So I ran off and hid for awhile until they gave up the chase. Not sure if I got over that river or not.
Leaving that unpleasantness behind me, I got up a little later than usual. Both boys were up and busy. The first thing I noticed was that “someone” had decided to unravel an entire roll of toilet paper in the hallway. Then that someone’s guilty conscience must have got to him, because I saw evidence of a half-hearted effort to re-roll it.
Halfway through our time at the Big House – part of it spent dyeing Easter eggs – I heard Puck yell from the living room, “AAH! YALI BIT MY TOE!”
I never learned what inspired the biting, but when the toe biter found himself working through a bowl of leftover Greek pasta in his high chair, Francis strolled in to stir up some trouble. A sheet of temporary tribal tattoos sat on the table, which he found too good to pass up. When I checked in later, Yali sported a full upper arm-band and was looking pretty proud of it until he decided he didn’t want it anymore and threw the remaining sheet of tattoos at his uncle. Temper, temper.
Francis moved on to Puck next, who wasn’t sure about the red onions in his pasta. “Guess what the Arctic explorers had to eat when they ran out of real food,” Francis said.
“Bugs?”
“Nope. They had to eat each other.”
“But how did they decide who got eaten first?”
Puck’s appetite was almost certainly sharpened after that conversation.
Meanwhile Carrie-Bri was baking baklava in the kitchen using a recipe from the 1950s which included ingredients like “sugar beet, grown in a barren land”.
Back home later that afternoon, I was feeling a little beat from the week.
“Guys, just give me a few minutes of quiet so I can get some stuff done in Dad’s office, okay?” I told them.
They gave me two minutes. Puck knocked on the door with a bloody finger and sharp shards of a glass vase he’d confiscated from a recent trash pile someplace.
“I whacked it open on the driveway, Mom,” he said calmly. “I wanted to get the buttons out of it. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”
What can you do? Hydrogen peroxide, bandage, sweep up the glass.
“Tell me if it doesn’t stop bleeding, bud.”
Back to two more minutes of quiet.