We Had a Talk About That

Screeeeeeeeech!

I walked out of the kitchen around five o’clock that evening. Yali had just rounded the corner with a roll of scotch tape in one hand. The tape had been stretched out of my bedroom where Puck held the other end. Yali apparently found this event to be absolutely hysterical.

“MOM! MOM!” Puck yelled from my room. “He did it! Yali did it! He stretched out all the tape!”

After a long day of running around, a lost roll of scotch tape really wasn’t high on my list of “things to fix”. So I got back to dinner.

Earlier in the day, I found myself working the lunch shift at school with Mom for the first time. Halfway through, I saw that Puck and Snicky had been removed from their table for “smushing their food”. When I walked over to Puck’s seat of isolation on the other side of the room, I asked him what was going on.

“I don’t know what I did!” he declared.

Typical. He really honestly didn’t know. I guess “smushing” perfectly good food isn’t something your average 3rd grade boy considers to be a crime. Later, we had a talk about that.

After three o’clock, I watched five busy kids run around the jungle gym in the shade of a warming afternoon. Heidi joined me on the bench for some conversation.

“What does Yali want?” she asked. “I want to buy things for him to make him love me.”

We had a talk about that, too.

Before dinner, Puck requested another walk. He biked while I pushed Yali in the stroller, his bare brown feet swinging over the edge.

“Mom? One of the girls at school says it’s okay to say OMG. I said it isn’t. We learned about that in the sermon on Sunday. That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

We had a talk about that. Also had a chat about tact.

I could feel it in my knee again; rain was coming. And the gutters had to be gutted of leaves. So when Oxbear got home a little late, he had just enough time to grab some dinner and hit the road to buy a ladder. I guess the boys somehow destroyed the other one. One never really knows exactly how these things happen…