Today has been a heck of a day.

First thing in the morning, we donated Benji’s entire giving jar, saved up over the course of a year, to Hopelink. It amounted to $55.50. We also got a tour of their food bank and the warehouse, and Benji got a good idea of what his $55.50 will do.

Then we watched to eclipse, which was the coolest thing I’ve seen, bar none. I carefully traced the pinhole image of the sun at consistent time intervals to capture the change over time. Benji, my uncle Gerard (who flew up from San Francisco to see Benji), my parents, and I all shared a couple pairs of viewing glasses as well as using the pinhole camera.

Between watching the eclipse, Benji colored a rainbow with chalk. When he finished, he had adults tell him what color we thought each was. Because Uncle Gerard was here, we skipped over obvious color names like light blue and went instead to nomenclature as sea foam.

There was great discussion over a color I would have just called pale pink, but which Benji wanted to call skin. We pointed out that skin came in lots more colors than just pale pink. Ultimately Uncle Gerard’s submission, peony, prevailed.

But after the fact, we were discussing Benji’s inclination to call that color skin. We joked that, really, we should have called the color alt-white, given how the current political climate is going.

After that, Benji built a Lego set and then napped. While he did that, Uncle Gerard and I went for a nice little walk.

Overall, a very successful day off work.