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Tía Lola?”
    “It looks like a beautiful yellow donkey with a pointy nose,” Tía Lola assures her. Somehow that makes both children happy.
    Tonight they are working in the kitchen so that Tía Lola can help with the piñatas while also minding the baking she’s doing for the party. She has already finished several batches of suspiros , cookies whose name means “sighs” because they are light and airy but (sigh!) gone before you know it. Also a tin full of caballitos , “little horses,” cookies with a kick of ginger. The kitchen smells delicious. Meanwhile, on the table, there are piles of bright tissue paper and a jar of paste and a pail of paintbrushes as well as chicken wire to make the frames on which to drape the strips of paper into a credible animal.
    “So what are you going to make?” Juanita challenges her brother, who has been doodling another page of zeroes in his notebook.
    Miguel shrugs like he doesn’t care. But in fact, he can’t seem to come up with any ideas at all for a cool piñata. He is starting to feel like a total loser, and not just in English class. When his little sister heads upstairs with Mami for her bedtime, Tía Lola sits down across the table from Miguel.
    “¿Qué hay, Miguel?” she asks. How is her nephew doing?
    Miguel sighs and closes his notebook. “I feel like I’m not good at anything.” He is ready to admit it—out of earshot of his sister.
    “Of course you are. You’re a good baseball player,” Tía Lola reminds him kindly. “You have a great imagination. You’re good with your hands. You have green fingers, like the Americans say.”
    “It’s thumbs, Tía Lola, green thumbs,” Miguel corrects her. All last summer, Miguel did help Tía Lola with her vegetable garden, which she insisted on planting in the shape of the Dominican Republic. Actually, all he did was follow her directions. “And I’m not exactly good at any of those things, Tía Lola, just average. And lately, below average.”
    “Con paciencia y con calma, se subió un burro en una palma,” Tía Lola counsels. It’s a little rhyme that makes Miguel smile in spite of his impatience: “With patience and calm, even a donkey can climb a palm.” In his imagination, Miguel sees a donkey struggling to get up a palm tree.
    “The best ideas come when you relax and let your mind play,” Tía Lola is saying. “So take a deep breath and count to ten.”
    Miguel does just that. When he is done counting, Tía Lola tells him to begin again! “This time, I want you to count to ten in Spanish. Uno, dos  …” She talks Miguel through the exercise, reminding him to breathe between each number.
    Just as they are getting to diez , ten, a flashbulb goes off in Miguel’s brain. He has a great idea for a piñata: a palm tree to go along with his sister’s donkey!
    “What are you laughing at?” Mami has joined them in the kitchen after tucking in Juanita.
    “Myself, I guess,” Miguel says, and that’s not a white lie either. Tía Lola has always said that a sense of humor is a sense of perspective. Now Miguel sort of knowswhat she means. Everything that seems worrisome and huge can suddenly look manageable and small if you take the time to be patient and see the humor in things. Like imagining that poor donkey struggling to climb up a palm tree.

    By Friday, however, Miguel is feeling impatient again. He sits in school all day, wondering if Papi has already arrived in Vermont. He counts to ten and diez so many times, any donkey would have climbed up to the clouds by now.
    In math, the long-division problems seem to go on forever. Afterward, it’s science and how gravity works. Talk about borrrring ! In social studies, the class is putting together a poster, titled IF YOU WERE THERE IN 1492: EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE TIME OF COLUMBUS . Who cares? Miguel thinks.
    Then, after lunch, spelling, penmanship, and the dreaded reading period. By the time the final bell rings, Miguel is ready to bolt. But he still