Opinions

“Carrie, you’re going to go out dressed like that?”

Mom stared at Carrie-Bri, uncertain about the green Billabong t-shirt, yoga pants, and black leather bomber jacket she had just slipped on.

“What, Mom? It’s just breakfast.”

She switched the gray yoga pants for black anyway, and the t-shirt for something less green. But Mom still wasn’t completely convinced.

“What about your hair though?”

“MOM!”

Cracker Barrel. 9:15AM. Diana, Baby Bee, and Eve joined us for eggs, bacon, biscuits, and French toast. Baby Bee snoozed in the chair next to Diana as the hostess walked past us and grinned at Carrie.

“You got a compliment,” she said. “Someone just walked past me and said you were beautiful.”

“Ha!” Carrie exclaimed. “Take that, Mom!”

Meanwhile, Puck found his own indignities in life while explaining Mary and her sinister ways to El Oso on the drive to school. As he listed her offenses, he became more and more irritated.

“She is just a numbscrat!” he declared in a sudden moment of inspiration.

When you’re not allowed to call little girls names, just make up your own.

The afternoon flashed past over at the Big House where I knocked out some more work on the slowly disintegrating laptop – new chunks of white plastic seem to fall off each week – and Carrie tried not to nap through her pilot’s training manual. I think that’s what she had open at the kitchen table, while Snuggles head-butted her for additional scratching. What can I say, MLB gave the Cardinals a day off. They could use it.

By the time Puck and I returned home with sacks of groceries and homework late that afternoon, Crackers had turned most of my “Ballerina” plant, brown.

“Cut that out, Crackers,” I warned her as she began nibbling again. “That’s not your personal salad.”

She never listens to me. I put up with her pretty well, I’d say. I could take her sleeping the entire night on my legs, waking me up about every half hour, but when it comes to my plants, I draw the line.

And Puck got a little teary at bedtime when he learned that Minecraft had been recently sold to Microsoft.

“Are they still going to make Minecraft, Dad?”

You couldn’t ask for a worse prospect for this kid. They talked it over.