More Cupcakes

6:06AM – “Mom? Where’s Waddles?”

Too early for Saturday. Puck found his glitter-eyed beanie boo still slumbering in his bunk and went back to bed. Back to bed, but not to sleep. Half an hour later, he asked permission to turn on his light and read. And I caught up on some Z’s.

Puck stared at the computer screen. A bowl of Cheerios was momentarily forgotten as he tried to comprehend the fat creature blinking back at him. It was sort of a spur of the moment idea to bring out that one tiny – and only – DVD I recorded of Puck when he was a baby. Sleepy big blue-gray eyes, triple rolls of chin fat.

“You mean that ugly brute is me? I look like an old man!”

After awhile, Puck grew bored with himself. He danced out of Oxbear’s library into the kitchen. “Some of my baby skills haven’t been lost!” he declared, boogieing it down across the linoleum.

When Oxbear rolled up the driveway after ten o’clock from a few hours of circus-lifts, tire-flipping, coffee and zucchini bread with his buddies in South City, we prepared to leave.

Biographies, packing tape, chocolate coins, Culver’s butter burgers, UPS store … these errands complete, Gloria was waiting for us at the Silverspoon’s, crackling hearth fire included.

We could only stay about an hour, but the sleepy tone of the afternoon inspired thoughts of that old Swedish claymation about a penguin on Netflix – Pingu.

Theodore walked in a little while later, wearing an Indiana-Jones-esque hat.

“What’s with the hat?” Puck asked.

“It’s called – wearing it,” Theodore replied, and plopped it on Puck’s big blonde head.

Homemade key lime cupcakes, homemade strawberry cupcakes, a house-full of people in O’Fallon, backed up against cow pasture. Birthday party number three on the year – one year-old baby girl. We brought a stack of Little Golden Books wrapped up for the occasion, met up with old faces from Old Church.