Tingly Feelings

Life had sped up about 50% since Puck started school. Maybe more.

Lunch room. 10:15. The lady in charge wearing purple pants, red hair, and an upbeat attitude, showed me the ropes. Two hours serving chicken strips, fries, carrots, and grapes to three groups of incredibly loud children was where I found myself for the rest of the morning.

I joined Puck at the table between serving groups. He waved wildly at me. A 2nd grade baby-faced girl leaned over to him across the table.

“Hi, Puck. Do you remember me from the tetherball?”

“Yes,” was the only response she got.

Earlier, I had been told that his teacher’s and art teacher’s daughter gets “a tingling feeling in her stomach” every time she sees him. Here we go.

“Hi, Pucky,” one of the boys called down the table from him. “Is that your mom?”

I only heard that comment because one of the teachers had just flicked the lights for silence. It had been so loud the past twenty minutes, my ears almost fell off.

“Is it always this loud?” I had asked Puck.

“Yes,” he nodded, biting into his PBJ. “Sometimes they scream.”

Couldn’t do it.

After lunch, he hurried to clean up while I went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later he ran over in his blue hoodie, waving to me.

“See you at free (three)!”

I had two hours to get some work done, so I drove back to the Big House where Mom and Carrie were still out. When they got back, Mom told me about Irish’s “study session” with her friend Sunday afternoon.

“She taught Linnea how to write her name in cursive, upside-down.”

All those life essentials.

Puck chugged through a large sub and fat apple slices for dinner while I learned that our expected adoption date had been extended another four months. This is expected. September 2016 was the new estimate. I didn’t tell Puck about it. He was busy anyway, wiping his spelling words off the white board with his stinky socks.