A proper birthday has to start with a proper birthday breakfast and a phone call from Babcia. For E, this meant an omelette for breakfast. Never mind that this was only the second time he’s ever had an omelet, a proper omelette, but he fell in love with it earlier this week, on Mother’s Day, and decided that it was his favorite breakfast of all time. Making omelets though is a time-consuming task, so although I layered the sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, and bacon bits very carefully for the Boy, the rest of us got it all mixed up in scrambled eggs.
“I could have it that way, I guess,” he confessed. “It’s the same thing, just all mixed up.”
The phone call from Babcia was a little less fluid. E is reticent to speak Polish, so although he understands everything Babcia says, he usually responds in English then turns to K, expecting a translation. Today Babcia tried to help him out, tried to ease his anxiety. She asked him simple questions like, “Are the flowers blooming?” or “What color are the flowers?” Yet he was still reluctant to speak Polish.
School today for him was relatively simple. At first, he wanted yesterday to complete as much of today’s work in addition to yesterday’s work as possible. But yesterday in the afternoon he decided that was not the best plan after all. He was ready for some free time. This meant of course that he had all the work for today to complete.
At the beginning of this quarantine, a day’s worth of work was just that: a day’s worth of work. The amount was greater than it is now, to be sure, but he fussed incessantly how about the frustrations he was feeling, about the difficulty of the math problems, about the length of the readings. We are half expecting such antics today, interspersed with cries of, “But it’s my birthday. Why do I have to work on my birthday?” However, he plowed through his work with relative ease, making it through math, which was subtracting three-digit numbers from three-digit numbers, each problem requiring regrouping and then word problems, in less than fifteen minutes. He wrote two more chapters of his frog/toad book and was done.
In the afternoon, we headed back down to the spot where we’d caught and inadvertently killed a minnow yesterday. I thought perhaps we might have a repeat, feared it in some ways — who wants to just go around killing little fish? Yet E was keen to try again. We did try again, and caught three fish. Two of them made it back to the water fine.
One of them — well, we didn’t quite hook him in the mouth but somehow hooked him through his body. He was already bleeding when we pulled him out of the water.
While we were down there, L came to the balcony and yelled across the yard, “You guys need to come back! Now!” At first, I was afraid that something had happened to Papa. Of late he’s been spending afternoons on the deck wallowing in nostalgia by exploring songs he hasn’t heard in decades, all thanks to Spotify.
Instead, we all got a pleasant surprise:
E’s best friend’s mother drove him by our house to wish the Boy happy birthday.
As for our celebration, we played a trick on him that Nana and Papa played on me a couple of times: give him something that’s relatively worthless without the other item. Like a cable to hook up a laptop to something suggesting that it might work with an old laptop, then giving a new one as a surprise (a la Nana and Papa).
We gave him a tablet case and screen protector. He’d been asking for a tablet for some time, and we thought we’d see what would happen if he got only the empty shell. “You can keep and maybe you’ll get a tablet next year,” I suggested. “Oh, that’s great,” he said very calmly — not really upset, not really thrilled.
Then, when he opened Papa’s present, lo and behold — an Amazon Fire, just for him.
Finally, there was the cake. L began working on the cake yesterday and decided to add to it today. A two-tiered cake, each with two layers.
The slices were impressive to say the least. K and I split one: she took the top tier, and I worked on the bottom one. The Girl is getting the flavors down — she’s still not thrilled with the presentation, though.
“Patience and practice,” K said to her. Though perhaps not quite so much practice while we’re all locked down.
