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“One, two, three, and jump!” I exclaimed as I lifted Noah and put him into the shopping cart. He giggled as he kicked his feet. “Alright,” I said. “What’s the rule?”
“Bums in the basket!” he said before sitting down and crossing his legs.
“That’s right!” I said as I went back around to the cart handle and started pushing. “Good job, little man.”
“What are we getting at this store?” he asked, looking up at the high ceilings.
“A couple of things,” I said. “We’re going to get some paint, and some carpet samples, and some cleaning supplies. Do you know what this store is called?”
“The building store?” Noah guessed.
“Close! It’s called a hardware store, or a home improvement store,” I said. “Do you remember what ‘improvement’ means?”
“That’s when you make something better, right?”
“Yep!” I said. “We’re here to start working on the kids room ideas you told me about.”
“Oh! That’s so cool!” he said excitedly. “So, are we gonna get the paint to make the big family tree? So we can put the whole pack family on it?”
“We sure are. And I want to get your help picking out the colors, okay?”
“Yeah!”
We wandered through the aisles together, picking up this and that. As per usual, I wound up grabbing way more than I’d originally intended to, but...I couldn’t help it. We had a huge mansion-hotel-compound to put together, and more displaced shifters coming every day. We’d managed to do a good amount to make the place more livable, but it was still looking woefully empty and, well, unfinished.
So far, we’d had a couple dozen shifters move into the space, all sharing some of the larger rooms we’d managed to turn into hostel-style dormitories. There was one for the men and one for the women. But the situation was proving to cause some tension, so we were trying to get things spaced out and ready for more reasonable space-sharing arrangements.
“Hey, M-Mar…M-Momma?” Noah asked me as I was agonizing over wall-mounted lighting.
“What’s up, Noah?” I asked, smiling over at him.
“I made a new friend up on the hill,” he said.
“You did?” I asked. “What’s their name?”
I already knew about the young shifter girl he’d met. I’d seen him playing with her quite a few times now. But I wanted to make sure not to take the wind out of his sails. Noah had been through the wringer when Cole went missing for a few weeks, and he still showed quite a bit of separation anxiety and sadness when we were apart from his dad. Letting him engage in these conversations with me, where he shared something he was proud of, helped keep his mood light when we were apart.
“Her name is Daisy,” he said. “She’s really smart and funny and strong.”
“Yeah? Tell me more about her.”
“She has a family kind of like ours. She has a momma and a step-daddy,” he said. “She said that she came from a different place. Not a different state, but a...”
“A country?” I offered. “A place that isn’t the United States?”
He nodded eagerly. “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It was from a place called...candy-da.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Canada?” I asked. “She’s from Canada?”
“Yeah!” he said. “She said she’s canday-di-nan.”
“That’s really close!” I said. “Try this—Can-ah-dah.”
“Can-ah-dah,” he repeated.
“Okay, now try, Cah-nay-dee-ahn.”
“Cah-nay-dee-ahn,” he repeated.
