electric boogaloo

Beige makes me grumpy. Left unchecked, grumpy will expand into depressed and that has a way of inflating to take up the whole house until none of us can breathe in here so we run outside, get in the car, and drive until we find another place to live. Move in. Walls are cream or offwhite or beige. We either paint the walls or go through the whole thing again.

I love the house we are renting. It’s perfect except for all the beige. So much beige. But! But but but… even though we have permission to paint we decided to take a huge risk and not. Paint.

I let that idea settle for a little while. Stopped bringing home guilty little stashes of paint chips. That was a huge step. Stopped putting off hanging pictures on the walls, waiting for the right time to paint.

Now it’s fun. A challenge! How can I make this place all bright and happy and full of my favorite colors without painting and without damaging anything and without spending much money at all? We dyed the white chair turquoise. Hung a green and blue rug on the wall. Pulled out all of my random stashes of gayly colored fabric, which I buy in minimum quantities because although I’m terrible at sewing I love fabric very much. Pulled out all of the art prints and children’s drawings and etsy finds and printmaking experiments. Pulled out all of the frames I bought for last year’s holiday rush that turned out not to happen in framed print form.

It’s so different from any place we’ve Tiffanyd up before, but every time a new thing goes into place there’s this great relief in my chest. Ah. There. See? Blue and orange and pink and green. Everything is okay. That’s why, even though I have hundreds of thousands of things to do, 20% of my brain energy is working in the background planning what will go where and making decorating decisions. 20% is a lot. Qualifies as an obsession. To the point that what I opened this tab to write about was Graham and how intense and wonderful and frustrating and huggable he is, but look what happened instead.

I love that he will always admit if he doesn’t know something. He doesn’t pretend to understand. He’ll interrupt me to ask what a word means and isn’t afraid to ask again five minutes later because he forgot. I also love that he takes little credit or blame for his ideas. See, he’s from another world. So HE didn’t make up this game, it was invented by his teacher on that other world and she taught it to him. So if the rules are confusing and weird and you don’t like the game, well it doesn’t hurt his feelings. It’s not that the game was invented by a four year old who barely understands the idea of turn taking. It’s just that it’s a game from a different world so you don’t get it. On HIS world though, believe you me, this game is all the rage and everybody understands how to play and also the importance of letting him win. And on HIS world, people write in little symbols that unfortunately don’t look like the English alphabet. Don’t worry, he can translate it for you.

And on his world dogs like having toy helicopters waved over their faces, so you shouldn’t be mad at him for forgetting that the same isn’t true on all worlds. Easy mistake. Cultural divide, really.

It really infuriates him that he has to sometimes do what we tell him to do. On HIS world he is basically almost a grownup and it’s ridiculous that he should come here and be treated like a child. One night last week we were reading Gus was a Friendly Ghost — one of those weekly reader things I got in like second grade? — and at some point Gus snaps and yells at his friend (hey, the book is called Gus WAS a Friendly Ghost. Past tense. He WAS friendly, right up until the point where he turned into a raging A hole). Anyway, the book mentioned that Gus’ voice was filled with fury.

Graham wanted to know what fury was.

“Fury — or being furious — is when you feel so angry that you have to work to control it.”

“Oh! Like when you get so mad that you want to hit someone?”

“Right. Exactly. Like when someone tells you no and then you just feel like your whole body is mad.”

“Like when you are so mad at, at, at your parents or something? That you feel like breaking your whole bed apart?”

“Yep.”

“Or like when they are standing in the doorway telling you something and you think you want to like KICK that doorway so super hard and the whole thing will collapse all over them and damage them and maybe the whole HOUSE will throw itself down on top of that doorway where the person is because you were just SO MAD at them that you were kicking the doorway and that’s what happened?”

“Yes. That’s… Yes.”

“Or you want to push that person into a rug and then fold up the rug and step on them?”

“Can we finish the story now?”

“Yeah. I love Gus.”

This is all probably good to have on record for any future therapists to review. Not his future therapists; obviously he is going to be fine. Our therapists.

It’s too hot to post. And whenever it cools off enough that I could maybe think about words, we have a thunderstorm and the power goes out. That’s a lie; I have lots of minutes every day that could add up to plenty for blog blogging but the summer is here and our days are so full of words and noise that at the end I just can’t.

School work has been light this week because Nicolaus wanted to go to yoga camp. I couldn’t think of any more suburbanite yuppie thing to send my kid to, so I said absolutely. Which, I could kick myself because I found out that we have equestrian camps all over Atlanta — that would have been more suburbia, don’t you think? Oh well. Next year. At least I’m driving 25 minutes to get him to the camp and we pass a ton of strip malls and drive-thru places on the way. So that’s something.

I don’t even know who I’m making fun of. Me, most likely.

So yeah. It’s hot outside and we are busy doing nothing but then! For no reason at all, Nicolaus is suddenly a bit better at reading. He is still mixing up b, d, p, and q which who can blame him? Look at those! They are practically the same exact letter. But he’s much better at using context to fix the problem and most importantly, KEEP MOVING FORWARD. That’s my biggest challenge in teaching him to read, he stops to chat after every single sentence while I try not to show that he is killing me. When it comes to listening to a second-grade level book about bats, hey, I’m there! Nobody is more there than me! Bats, hell yeah! Let’s rock this! But after 45 minutes — oh my god are we only on page six? I start feeling this sort of antsy/hatey feeling that’s hard to define. It feels like a traffic jam. On a rainy day. With the radio stuck on smooth jazz, and oh no I really need to pee. But there’s nothing I can do to make the traffic move, and if I focus on how far it is to the next exit I will only feel more anxious to get there.

So that’s the breakthrough this week: he is going from one word to the next without me having to remind him. Oh dear sweet reading HOV lane! WE ARE MOVING.

Teaching a kid to read from scratch has forced me to think a lot about our language as I try to explain the rules of pronouncing crazy things. Why DO some words have silent K at the beginning? I guessed that these were medieval words… finally looked it up and yes, they came from a Germanic influx during the middle ages.

Silent e… well, I bet that wasn’t always silent. And -ed words used to be pronounced the way they look.

And what about -gh- ? Well, I’d never thought about it before but I suppose at one time it had a sound, just like th, sh, and ch. Sort of a throaty Scottish gc sound maybe?

It seems to help him to know the history, though he finds it outrageous that we can’t now fix the spelling of those words. In time, texting teens will fix it all I’m sure.

So yeah. I have the most ordinary problems lately… so what is there to post about? We hate mosquitoes, and the boys need to clean up their messes, and the dishes are a hassle. Money stresses us out. Our kids argue over nothing. Silly little problems.

Kevin’s been busy working on making jewelry (foreshadow foreshadow) while I’ve been busy raking leaves and leaves and more leaves. I’m almost done with my crazyperson’s leaf raking project. Underneath all the many years of dead leaves I have found:
* A great many worms, mosquitos, ants and spiders
* Basically compost
* Several holes in the ground
* Some neat stone/concrete pavers
* Lots of cute rings of mondo grass that were once planted around each tree, long since squished flat by the leaves
* A horrible little mess of a flower garden.

Someone started this a few years ago and gave up when they realized that sloping gardens suck and so do cinderblocks and shady spots, so now I’m left with a very ugly blob of a garden. I’m doing my best to clean it up. Same for the front yard — I don’t care about plants and yards and things! I really don’t. But for some reason I got scissors and trimmed all of the bushes and limbs and stuff out front. I pulled up weeds, pruned the big flower plant and even looked up what the hell kind of plant it is. Hydrangea. Aren’t I fancy?

This isn’t a real post. Please just ignore it. I will write a better one when the weather cools off. In the meantime I leave you with recent wisdom from Graham:

• I know how waves are made. Water gives part of itself to some other water. And that makes a wave.
• Ants have a bottom that looks like the part a spider uses to make silk thread, but instead they use theirs to make ant bites.
• It is your fault that I lost my silly band because you are the one who took me to the store where I bought it. If you had not drove me there, I would never have bought it, so later that same day I would not have been able to lose it.
• I just made a really important discovery! Everything is always moving! And it can’t ever stop.
• I can’t really miss Daddy when he’s at work. Because he’s still on this same Earth as me.
• I am from a different world and sorry but you can’t understand my language. (we hear a lot about this different world and pity to the fool who calls it a planet. It’s not a PLANET. It’s a WORLD.)

And he has questions. Oh my gosh the questions are killing me because to him everything is on Wikipedia and if I can’t find the answer I must just not really want to because I’m a mean mama who is just being MEAN to be mean. Yesterday he wanted to know:
Exactly how many ice cream trucks are there driving around right now?

Another one was: Do girls stand up to poop?

I told you. Not a real post.

We were talking about the Civil War and the tragedy of friends and families taking up different sides and feeling sick over it. I started to say “try to imagine fighting and even shooting at your own brother” but quickly realized that to ages four and seven that sounds like a normal day. So I asked Nicolaus, “How would you feel if Lovie said she thought slavery was great?”

He dismissed it right away, “She would never do that!” Oh because that’s what everyone wants to believe, isn’t it. MY pet bird would never be a racist. MY pet bird would never support the Confederacy. MY pet bird would never bite the holy living swearword out of my mother for trying to feed her.

Nicolaus thought for a little while about what something like that would do to their relationship. He loves her more than anything and he feels strongly that slavery was clearly evil and wrong. Ultimately he couldn’t imagine it. He decided that he would simply convince her that it’s wrong, and they would get married and have babies who would hatch out of tiny eggs and maybe even have wings.

So we switched back to brothers. And how hard it would be to believe in something so strongly when your brother disagreed.

Graham, master of the almost-related insight, announced, “I believe in God!”

“Really?” Nicolaus subscribes to a complex belief system which is a mashup of Buddhism, Greek Mythology, Skepticism, and bird-related magic. The idea of a single, all-powerful God doesn’t work for him at this point.

Graham frowned. “Wait a second. Let me think.” He thought. “Yup. I even know what he looks like. Like EXACTLY. I saw him in a movie, just for a second, just part of a movie and I remember it exactly. And he really could be real.”

Before bed I gave the kid some paper and a crayon even though it was late at night because if we could get a real picture of what God looks like EXACTLY, man. I don’t even know how rich and famous.

He drew confidently. God was too large to fit on the page. Triangle eyes, small nostrils for a nose, a mouthful of sharp teeth. Horns on his head. Hey, wait a minute.

Then he added a curved spine and a tail, “which I KNOW has spikes on it like this.”

God was looking sort of like a dinosaur.

“Is he mean? Or nice?”

“I don’t really know because I didn’t get to see the whole movie, just a little part of it. But he was breathing fire and he stomped and scared people so I guess he might be pretty mean.”

“He was breathing fire?”

“Yeah. That’s why I drew fire over here in the background.”

That’s right. Whenever people around him have talked about going to church or praying to God to help them or have told him that God is powerful and great, my child thought that they were talking about Godzilla.

A list!

1. The giveaway. Alright, here’s what’s what on the giveaway: I can’t decide. I like them all. There aren’t a lot. Everyone wins!

I’m going to email you guys with details and will ship out prints etc next week.

2. Thank you SO much for the perspectives on pushing the kids to do work they hate. Really, really helpful stuff. I’m going to re-read that entire thread often as this issue comes up in new ways.

3. Now here it is, midnight. Did you know that until the mid-1800s nobody paid much attention to what time it was? Stupid train schedules ruined everything. Before that you just got your kid to yoga class sometime in the afternoon, and soccer games were day-long events so you know, show up and start playing if you want to. It’s not like it matters! It’s 1837. Like any of this is going down in history anyhow.

We are studying the 1800s right now, so I’m full of exciting facts about western expansion and capitalist jerks running the railroads and corporate responsibility and the wild west and bison and trails of bodily fluids and Sitting Bull and inevitable wars and holy moly have you ever thought about all of the individual parts that had to be made before they could build a single steam locomotive? It was a lot of work! They didn’t even have power tools! How people stayed motivated to see that whole project through is a real testament to what humans will do for money.

Everything is all jumbled up, and I am finding the 1800s a little overwhelming. So much happened all over the place, so much changed. Even if you only focus on these United States — which is not possible but IF — it’s still crazy. Inventions, art, music, science. Emmigration, Indians, slavery. Factories, pioneers, wars, business, on and on.

My dad suggested following the history of New York City. Now that we’ve waded in and I’m overwhelmed I understand why a microcosmic approach might have been better.

4. So next week is the civil war. The boys are really excited… we live in Georgia afterall; battlefields are part of the scenery here. Nicolaus says he hates that he was born in a slave state. To him there really is no justification for the confederate side of things. Graham just thinks the soldiers wore great hats.

5. I think I forgot to tell you that my hair is purple now. And it looks weirdly natural.

6. We are on the verge of hopefully very exciting Nerdy Baby news. Hoping hoping hoping. It looks promising, but until everything is 100% definite I don’t want to say. Shhhhh I have said too much!

7. One of Graham’s pet fish died this week. Her name was Cutie Pinkface and he misses her an awful lot considering he used to forget he even had fish for days at a time.

We keep having conversations like this:
I’ll be talking about something nerdy, “… that’s why the job was so dangerous. It was a lot better once the railroads were forced to install the new coupling for connecting all the cars…”

“So the cufflink the thing that was cutting their fingers off?”

“Right. But it’s not cufflink, it’s couPLing.”

“Ohh! Why is it called that?”

“Well, a couple means two of something that are joined together. When you connect cars together you are making them into a couple… you are coupling them.”

And this is where Graham adds in a sad voice, “My fish used to be a couple, but the one that was named Cutie Pinkface died and now Spotty Head isn’t part of a couple anymore.”

Ooof. This weekend we might have to go to Petsmart.

8. The boys told me yesterday that it’s okay if they don’t get along well once they’re grownups because Graham wants to live in Egypt and Nicolaus wants to live in Greece. And those things are super super far from each other, like probably opposite ends of the Earth.

I made them go get the globe and each find their future home and oh no! We’re going to live close enough for frequent visits! We’d better figure out how to get along afterall.

9. I fell asleep for two hours just now, on the couch with a very cute dog curled up nearby. I forget what the ninth thing was going to be. If you ever have a chance to take a nap on the couch with a very cute dog, do it.

10. Because there should be ten things in a list, right? This week the boys earned money by helping me clean house and pack orders, then they spent that money on — swear to goodness — marbles. You know the sound of two dozen marbles rolling around on a wood floor? I do! I know the sound of two dozen marbles rolling around on a wood floor.

It’s a neat thing though. They study them, they talk about them, they trade them and make deals, they race them, they admire them in the sunlight. They do pretty much everything except play the game marbles.

(ps. I haven’t forgotten about the giveaway! We just got back from Texas and I’m still returning to regular life.)

I do sometimes — only for tiny wriggling little gruesome moments — understand why schools and corporations and governments are so eager to hammer out creativity. Everyone likes creativity in theory… oh creative people, we are bored! Do something surprising or write a novel or a movie or a comic book for us! Man this problem really has us stuck. Can we get a creative type in here to solve it?
Creativity looks fun, too, right? so everyone says “I wish I was creative.” or “Oh wow, I love how creative kids are!”

But people also know that creativity is horribly inefficient. If the people you hire to paint your house show up with tiny watercolor brushes, you aren’t going to be excited about their creativity.

And that’s what school is like around here whenever I focus on skills. If we are listening or exploring or discussing the topic or doing activities together, we have no problems. The Ard School rocks for that kind of thing. But when it’s time to simply practice writing the letter C until you form muscle memory, creativity becomes a right pain in the cussword.

When it’s time to write, Nicolaus stops between every word or sentence. He tells jokes, discusses themes found within the book Emily’s Moo, adds funny pictures, makes his words talk in fake voices, adds curls to every letter, changes the rules, strikes a bargain, tells a funny story, and/or suggests an alternative to the right way to do this. Graham does this too with almost any game or anything with a dry set of rules. Their brains never shut off, they never take any instructions at face value. That is good! Creative!! But oh my god, I am going to deliberately become an alcoholic just to survive the process of watching Nicolaus write a single swearing paragraph.

I said that with love in my voice, could you tell?

The other day Nicolaus was writing about a bird flying around, so he wrote the word SPLAT all over the place until his narrator finally said SPLAT I give up. His writing is always silly like that. It’s awesome and frustrating and awesome. And frustrating. And AWESOME.

and frustrating.
Yesterday in the middle of his handwriting practice, Nicolaus started working on a Lewis and Clark style map and was outraged when I asked him to stop working on it, save it for later, it’s time to work on your handwriting book. Please write the letter C thirty or more times so your hand muscles will learn how to make that curve, how to swoop counter clockwise. Wax on, wax off, paint the fence!

He finally worked on the letter C and went back to work on his map. Out of meanness I interrupted him again and asked him to write a straight-laced piece about his trip to Texas. Just one plain boring sentence. Please. He started to argue then sighed, shooed me away. After a long time, he called me over to inspect his work.

“You aren’t going to like it,” he told me, “I did make it a little bit fancy. Sorry.”

He had written “Texas is a desert and deserts are hot.” No funny stuff, no crazy font, no first person narrator screaming about the heat. It was perfectly boring, except that he had drawn a cactus in between each word instead of a space.

“Good,” I told him, “good work.”

“You aren’t mad?”

“About what?” I pretended not to notice.

“All the cactuses and succulents?”

“Oh! Nah. I can read everything else.”

“Ohhhhh! So it’s just the actual letters you don’t want me to make fancy. I can put whatever I want around them?”

“Hm. If… well. The problem is it takes a lot longer to write a sentence that way doesn’t it? I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t decorate the sentence like that but I’m not mad either.”

The drawings were cool. I hear myself griping at him to focus and move forward. I interrupt him, I clamp down fire doors all around us to stop the rushing creative stuff from getting all over his work. Later I looked at the map he drew at the beginning. It is beautiful. My god. What is wrong with me?

But sometimes you have to put down your fascinating life’s work and just sit down and pay all the bills, right?

This is something that’s normally an amusing background non-problem problem; haha poor me my kids talk all the time and pretend to be from ancient times and other planets, they invent languages and solve problems and build things and tell jokes and draw elaborate narrated scenes from movies they want to make someday. But I’m struggling a little bit with the impulse to impose discipline. Is creativity something that can or should be shut off sometimes? Is there a time and a place? Can I sternly shut it off for awhile without making them feel like their ideas aren’t as important as good handwriting?

Part of me isn’t worried. I’ve hit this kind of parenting tangle before, and this is how it always feels. I over-worry it and then later look back and see that it was never a real problem. Just the age, just the phase, just temporary and normal and natural… it works itself out in a way I never expected because it turns out that my kids’ DNA is way smarter than I am. It knows what to do and keeps on building a kid whether I fret or not.

With that in mind, it really doesn’t matter whether I make Nicolaus sit and practice boring cuss for two hours every day. He will be fine either way. I know that. But in the meantime, he really does need to work on his handwriting.