Flour is sifting gently down onto our toes, encrusting the bottoms of our socks.

“No, Naomi!  It’s my turn to roll!” Milo insists as he yanks the cutting board with the hunk of cookie dough away from his sister.

Naomi takes a last swipe at the dough before it’s wrenched from her grasp, and licks her fingers.

“Naomi, go wash your hands in the bathroom,” I command.

“Ok” she agreed, leaving floury footprints on the blue carpet.

“Milo, hang on, be gentle.  Don’t just smash the dough with the rolling pin!”  I can feel my wrinkles deepening.  Phil Keaggy’s acoustic guitar broadcast through a tiny cell phone speaker isn’t enough to maintain my calm.

Earlier that morning Milo had delved into the corner cupboard and resurfaced with a miniature cook book in hand.  “Let’s make these cookies!” had he suggested, eagerly.  I had flipped through the book.  They all involved cookie cutters, piped icing,  sprinkles, and references to what “mum or dad” could do to help.  But I guessed that there was really no reason NOT to spend an hour or two baking.  First thing in the morning my patience would be at its highest apex…not that that’s super reassuring, knowing my low reserves of that commodity.

“Ok, we can do that.” My lack of enthusiasm doesn’t dampen Milo’s zest at all.  “Just let me have a cup of tea first.”

I pulled the butter from the fridge and struggled to cut off a hunk.  “You’re going to use half of it!” Milo insisted.

“175 grams, yup,” I responded grimly.

Milo climbed up on the counter and reached for the microwave, apparently planning to open its door while balancing on one knee with a glass bowl of butter in his other hand as a counter weight.

“Hang on, hang on, hang on!  Let me do that!”  I remonstrated.

“My turn to stir!” Milo asserted, slopping the butter from one side to the other.

“No, my turn!” Naomi, never to be left behind, affirmed her rights.

“Stop, don’t pull!” I bark.  “You’ll have a turn after Milo!”  I scoop a cup of sugar.

“Can I dump that?”  Naomi sees her chance.

The bowl passes to Naomi.  “You’re not doing it right!” Milo, always the authority on everything, insists.  He leans over the bowl and Naomi turns her shoulder protectively.  The chairs they’re perched on wobble.

“Hey, stop pushing in!” I raise my voice, pulling on Milo’s shoulder.

Just then a teacher’s quote about PTA conferences pings in my mind.  “When you meet the parents, you forgive the child completely.” 

Sigh.

It was bed time, and boy was I read for it. I wanted a prompt end to a sh**y day. Just as I was leaving his room, Milo goes “Mom, when are we going to move houses?”

“I don’t know when we’ll move next, Milo….why do you ask?”

“I wondered when I wouldn’t have to go to school with Charlie.”

“Oh.”  I turned around and sat down again at the foot of the bed.  “You know, Milo, you have to learn how to deal with people you don’t like.”

He grimaced.  “Charlie’s a silly boo-boo butt.  He’s always mean to me.”

I was familiar with the Charlie complaint, as it’s been the reoccurring school gripe for the past several weeks.  I don’t doubt that Charlie’s acting like a little twerp, but I’m also quite sure Milo is fully of twerpiness himself.  The two boys were best buddies a few months ago.  I’m not sure what happened, but the puzzle doesn’t seem to be solvable by the First Act of Defense taught to New Entrant students, namely, declaring in a clear and authoritative tone: “Stop it, I don’t like it.”  Of course, any antagonist knows that their object doesn’t like their teasing, that’s why they’re doing it.  Clearly.

“But you can’t just quit when you run into someone you don’t like.  Some day you’re going to have a job, what if you run into someone you don’t like there?  You can’t just quit your job all the time, then you wouldn’t have any money to buy food and pay for a house and take trips.  You have to learn how to cope with people you don’t like.  They you’ll win.”

Milo giggled.  He likes winning.

“Do you know, I didn’t used to be good at dealing with people I didn’t like either.  Then I got a job, and discovered that I didn’t like my boss, the one who tells me what I have to do.”

“Why didn’t you be the boss?” Milo wanted to know.

“Ha!  You don’t get to start out being the boss!”  My mind flitted to a certain type of entrepreneur who starts their own business just precisely so they don’t have to work for someone else…but no need to complicate the story.  “I didn’t like my boss because he wasted my time and he wasn’t fair and I didn’t like the decisions he made.”

Milo is all ears now.  “Why didn’t you go work for someone else, then?” he wanted to know.

“For me, there was no one else to work for in that town.  To work for someone else I would have had to move to a different town.  So I had to learn how to give him what he wanted, so he would give me what I wanted.  I gave him respect, and reports on time; he gave me independence.”

Milo giggled.  He also likes independence.  Probably even more than he likes winning.

“There are lots of other kids in your class, why don’t you play with someone else?”

“They’re all running around.”

“Well, you’re good at running, you can play that game.”

“They’re playing Thunderbirds.  I don’t know how to play Thunderbirds.”

“EVERYONE is playing Thunderbirds?  Even Emma?”

“Well, no… and not Ash.”  Milo’s mood seemed to be looking up.

“Ah, well, shall I check and see if Thunderbirds is on Netflix, and tomorrow maybe we can watch an episode?”

I got a big grin in response to that suggestion.

Legs below a curtain, that’s a bit suspicious, no?

Cheerful electronic noises filter through the curtain. Naomi is ensconced with our friend’s DS, illicitly playing video games. This is the first time I have noticed her being purposefully devious.

Milo, on the other hand, is more practiced at the art of deception…if not any more skilled.

It wasn’t long ago that he came home from school and disappeared, which is atypical for him.  Usually he’s busy poking Naomi, littering the house with inside-out-socks and waving sticks near our faces.  This afternoon cheerful cartoon noises were emanating from beneath his bed.  I peaked under the quilt.  He had the laptop.  He had successfully navigated to netflix and was watching DinoTrux, but he hadn’t figured out how to turn the down volume to a whisper.

It was a languid afternoon, drenched in sun, free of windy gripe, and since Jeremiah had put dinner to cook in the crock pot before leaving for work, I was free to enjoy the outdoors with the kids.  We sat on the porch eating popsicles and Milo started picking lawn daisies.

“Can you show me how to do a flower necklace like Chloe?” I showed him how to gently split a stem and thread another one through the hole.  He spent 30 minutes at least engrossed in the project, and was duly proud of the result.

He then went on to sew a flower necklace for Naomi, who had decided that matching her hat color to her dress was more important than keeping the sun off her face.

Oh, for more harmonious afternoons like this!

Milo sat at the table, eating his oats and fingering a seedling growing kit.  It’s a charming Kiwi thing, to give out a free seeding growing kit with a $40 grocery store purchase.  “You don’t know how to do this,” he taunted.  “You haven’t planted before.”

I looked at him quizzically.  Could my own son really not know what I do for work?

“We plant millions of plants at the greenhouse,” I said, reaching for the kit.  “What’s that you’ve got?”  I squinted at the little label that came with the box.  “Basil?…. Or Baahhhsil?” I re-pronounced the word, realizing that he may only know the Kiwi vernacular.  “We plant lots of bAYsil at work.”

“But do you plant it?” Milo was incredulous.

“Well….nnnoooo….not usually.  The last thing I planted was peppers,” I admitted, “several weeks ago, for an experiment.  The machine plants basil.”

Milo gave me the “I told you so” look.  “A machine plants basil?”  Obviously it wasn’t done with my very own fingers, so it didn’t count.

“It does,” I assured him.  “These little needles that are hollow suck up the seeds from a tray with a vaccum—shlurp!” I held up my fingers and flapped my wrists in imitation of the seeding machine.  “Then they spin around and dump the seeds in the tray—plop!  It does it again and again, until there are three-hundred and thirty-eight seeds in a tray!”  I don’t operate the machine, so “we” plant the seeds at Zealandia in the royal sense, but I felt that level of detail was unnecessary for my son’s education.

“Well, we plant these at school.”  Milo was only slightly impressed by my machine impersonation.  “This little thing is coconut fibre,” he said, holding up a flattened round disk.  “You add water and it puffs up.”

Sure enough, he did know how to soak the coir (coconut fibre) and scoop it sloppily into the paper pot, covering the tissue paper impregnated with basil seeds carefully with a thin layer of coir.  Hurray for school.

“We have coconut fibre at work too, except it comes in big slabs, and we really don’t use it that often.”  I could tell I was losing his interest.

“Am I going to see William today?”  He was on to the next subject.

“No, tomorrow.”  I resolved to bring home a picture of the basil growing in the greenhouse at work to prove to my son that…that what?  That I do work?  But I didn’t actually plant that basil, and neither did I water it, nor will I transplant it, nor take the customer orders, nor load it for dispatch.  What I do is rather abstract, and I guess I don’t blame him for not understanding it.

“See Milo, here’s the basil that grows at work. Thousands of seedlings!”

More basil. “See Milo!” He grinned. He still knows I didn’t actually plant it.