Mowgli and Tom Sawyer

After another fun Friday night and Saturday at Gloria’s, Puck was hoping to make it a regular habit.

“Mom! I know! How about I spend the night at Nana’s every weekend!”

“No, hon… Yali would wake her up every night.”

Puck paused to ponder the repercussions of this truth. “It’s okay! She would get used to it!”

One day he’ll understand.

Following church and luncheon that afternoon, Francis walked through the front door of the Big House.

“Did you bring the powdered sugar?” Carrie asked him.

“Yup.” He handed her a heavy sack, fresh from the grocery store.

“Francis! How much powdered sugar did you get?”

“It was two for three dollars!” he grinned.

“Francis! That is a HUGE amount of powdered sugar! I only needed enough to ice the cinnamon rolls!”

Homemade cinnamon rolls in pans right out of the oven. While Francis waited for this golden sustenance to be served, he browsed for milk, locating a half-gallon of 2% on the counter.

“Carrie, is this good to drink?”

“Francis, read the label on it,” I nodded.

My family has long had a habit of labeling reserved food stuffs with permanent marker. It’s often a matter of survival.

Francis turned the jug around and read: “No drink.” He paused, thinking about how he could work around that one. “Well, since it’s poorly grammarized… could I drink it, Carrie?”

Meanwhile, my boys managed to muck around in the huge mud patch in the backyard before I could stop them. And that mud only continued to thicken when they drove over to the school yard with Mom, Oxbear, and Francis to cook up some more adventure in further puddles.

While they got busy a mile down the road, Carrie-Bri began exploring the most popular baby names throughout the years, starting with Grandma Snicketts’ birth year, 1928, and moving forward. None of us six kids’ names were on the top three for our birth years. Although apparently mine is very popular in Denmark these days.

An hour later they walked back through the front door – both boys – without shirts, shoes, or socks, plastered in puddle mud.

“It’s like Tom Sawyer and Mowgli,” someone said.

So we packed up Tom Sawyer and Mowgli for the evening and headed back west for the bathtub.