The Amazing Box
After breakfast, Puck held my phone up to his mouth and spoke carefully into it. “Siri – can you tell me what the names of those bracelets are that have snow from the top of Mt. Everest and mud from the bottom of the Dead Sea in it?”
Siri had no answers for him. Sometimes Siri doesn’t know too much.
Around lunchtime we found out that Irish probably didn’t have mono. The doctor wasn’t one hundred percent sure what she had going on, but prescribed an antibiotic to kick the infection, whatever it was. She returned to her quarantine in Mom’s room until she was no longer contagious.
Carrie-Bri went to the freezer to find a popsicle for Irish’s sore tonsils. When Yali discovered that this popsicle was not for him, but for his aunt, he screamed in protest and slammed the door. The terrible terrible threes were upon us.
When we drove to school later in the afternoon, the east was stacked high in cloud towers.
I hauled Yali inside, asleep on my shoulder as is his recent afternoon drive-to-school habit.
About twenty minutes later, Yali and I found ourselves sitting alone on the carpet in Hans’ classroom. It had rarely been so quiet. Apparently Bob had found this “AMAZING BOX WHERE ALL THE TEACHERS THROW THINGS AWAY THAT THEY DON’T WANT ANYMORE!”, so he, Puck, and Heidi ran off to discover what great finds lay within. Awhile later they returned with old dum-dums, a box of unused stick-on name tags, and a toy fire truck which Puck allowed Yali to use.
The quiet didn’t last long. Back to the original dumpster diving grounds for the boys where all the volleyball girls ran around in packs screaming and giggling together before practice.
Finally, we retreated to the playground just in time for the rain.
Right as I served dinner to the boys – thunder. More rain. We sat on the porch after sandwiches and veg, to watch. Yali grinned at me like a fiend and walked out into the raindrops a few times, enjoying the drumming of water on his head and hands. Puck just watched him from one of the porch rocking chairs, sprawled all over the place with his math book, a pencil, and the complete inability to focus on his work with this level of entertainment surrounding him.