Uvalde

My soon-to-be 2YO granddaughter jumped on the couch next to me laughing hysterically in that toddler laugh that melts all your troubles away when you hear it on a TikTok video you watch over and over until you’re embarrassed at how much you love it.  Her toes are almost too small for “This Little Piggy” and her nose is so tiny and delicate that I can’t even play “got-your-nose” with her believably because my thumb is too big to pass for a baby’s nose and anyway she knows where her nose is and how to check that it’s still there, and she would keep laughing just as long as I kept saying, “Jump, monkey!” so the laughing didn’t stop at 0:59.

She was playing with her new pink Fingerling monkey that Oma ordered for her after the incident Saturday when her 7.5YO sister let her play with the new blue Fingerling monkey (named “Whisper”) that she had won/earned at the school carnival Friday evening by finding the “loosest slots” skill game to win prize tickets, then taken away when 2YO grew too fond of it so that 2YO cried, “Monkey! MONKEY!” and shed real tears and looked one after another to the grown-ups for help.

It was a fun school carnival with lots of tossing games spread in a rough oval around the grass playground that was still baking in the evening sunlight of the unusual heat wave – whiffle ball toss, ping pong ball toss into fishbowls, ring toss onto grappling hooks, nerf football toss into a sideways trash barrel, mini-basketball toss into the kind of lowered basketball hoop you see in pizza restaurants and penny arcades – with children 5-10 running and screaming and laughing and chasing each other through the game layouts and past the line of shoes outside the bounce house, and children 11-13 clustering in support groups in the shade trying to look cool. There was a “musical hula hoops” game played like musical chairs, a hammer-ring-the-bell game with a bell 6 feet above the strike lever, and a “pick the right little lollipop to win a big lollipop” game that ran out of big lollipops and started giving out the little lollipops so freely that I ended up storing 7 lollipops in my left cargo shorts “tech pocket.”  (Sadly, but fortunately for those who prefer their hands less sticky, the cotton candy stand ran out a little less than halfway through the 3-hour event.)

And, of course, there was face painting, which had the longest line.

7.5YO’s preferred game was the whiffle ball toss into round plastic baskets nailed to a piece of ½ inch plywood set at an angle with a hinge, a length of 1×3, and a chain.  As the carnival evening wore on, the game attendant became more and more generous with the win tickets, giving out one ticket per ball that stayed in the basket versus 1 ticket for 3 balls in the baskets when the evening began, and letting the contestants stand close enough to drop the whiffle balls onto the soft sides of the baskets where they stayed put instead of standing behind the jump rope on the ground and tossing them into the very centers of the baskets where they bounced hard off the plywood behind the basket bottoms and back to the contestant’s feet.

7.5YO had checked the prize table, identified her target and its cost, counted the tickets already in my right “tech pocket,” did some quick arithmetic, announced how many more tickets she still needed, and marched past us to the whiffle ball line. She played over and over until she had the number of tickets she needed. She ran to the prize table, traded her tickets for the blue Fingerling monkey, and announced, “We can go now.”

She had a sleepover with Oma and me that night, reportedly her first sleepover.  She awoke before us, made her own breakfast (Lucky Charms, eating only the marshmallows), and organized the refrigerator. Later she crafted her own bowl of her “special soup” from water, olive oil and sea salt and balsamic vinegar from the pizza we had Thursday night, soy sauce from a restaurant packet a previous AirBNB tenant had left, minced garlic from a jar in the fridge, uncooked rotini, and leftover broccoli from Wednesday night’s pot roast. Microwaved in 3 5-minute bursts at 50% power. It turned out surprisingly good. 7.5YO finished the whole bowl and announced, “I think the vinegar gave it the zing.”  Through it all she watched episode after episode of “The Magic School Bus” because she likes the science content.

Later that afternoon was the Fingerling monkey incident, and now tonight after tucking 7.5YO in, I was playing crib blanket peek-a-boo with 2YO on the couch and melting in her laugh when her mother came out of 15YO’s room where she had been helping study for a trigonometry test. She was holding her phone and said, “Did you hear about the school shooting in Texas?” We didn’t talk about it then on account of 7.5YO still being awake in her bedroom that Oma had helped her clean and organize after school and 2YO still jumping on the couch with the delicate little nose and toes and us not wanting to stop the laughing.