electric boogaloo

Graham has been wondering about the Beatles lately, so tonight before bed we had a question-answerathon. Anything I didn’t know, we looked up together on the internet… which of course led to watching clips of them performing. He was enthralled, and asked many more questions. Finally he slid off the couch to go towards bed and said, “They are amazing. You want to know the only thing I DON’T love about the Beatles? Just the sound of their actual voices whenever they are singing. But that’s the only thing.”

Sometimes I really don’t know about this kid.

9 pm last night, after dinner – Graham: Mama? my stomach hurts.
10 pm – Mama, my stomach hurts
11 pm – Mama, my stomach hurts
12 am – my stomach stilllll hurts, right in the middle
1 am – asleep
2 am – Mama? my stomach hurts, but I’m still asleep.
2:10 am – 9:30 am – asleep

9:30 am – Good morning, Mama! I’m really hungry
10 am – I ate two bites and then I accidentally gave my breakfast to the dog
11 am – now it hurts worse, in the middle and over on the right side.
12 noon – a hospital visit! Wow, that is so cool! This attention is making me feel better! I can’t wait to show all of the nice nurses and doctors how great I am at feeling great.
1 pm – An x-ray! Wow! A bowel obstruction? What’s that? A traffic jam made of poop? That is the funniest thing that has ever been wrong with me. When the cars in my intestines honk do you want to hear what it probably sounds like?

1 – 1:30 Continuous fart noises.

2 pm – 6:30 pm Let’s have lunch. Now I feel like running around and playing! Because I’m six and my parents just spent a whole month’s rent on a bottle of Miralax! Woooooo! Spring breaaaakkkk!! I’m all better and my mother completely overreacted hahahahahahaaaa! Want to see my gymnastics moves?

7:30 – Mama? I’m starving now
8:00 – I ate two bites of my sweet potato and now I’m full
9 pm – Instead of going to bed I’m going to wrestle with the dog now, okay?
9:30 – Now I’m hungry. And my stomach hurts.
10 pm Mama, I can’t sleep.
11 pm I can’t sleep
11:30 I feel horrible. My stomach hurts really bad.
11:45 Sorry for getting out of bed again. I need to go to the bathroom
12:10 Mama! The GREATEST NEWS! I finally really did poop and I could feel everything bubbling in my intestines and it feels a tiny bit better. Can I take paper to my bed with me so I can draw my idea for a really gross invention that would actually help people?

Summary/Diagnosis: oh my god.

It’s 12:40 in the morning, everyone is asleep. Hey! Let’s do a blog post! I can dig through my backlog of unpublished drafts — honestly this blog would be so much better if someone would sneak in here and hit “publish” every couple of days. The problem lately is: if I start writing an entry during the day I get pulled away to solve some tragic ninja-related problem. And if I wait till the quiet of night time, I am so exhausted from all of the day’s problem solving that I all asleep before the entry is finished.

So yeah, if I set these things to automatically post/publish after 12 hours then you’d get to read lots more of the weird little things that happen all the time.

Here’s what’s in the drafts folder now:
An update on Graham
State of the Nicolaus address
Househunting
Weight weight don’t tell me
New thoughts about home schooling

Hmm… should I pick one? Or write a new one? I don’t know!

For now I will give you a quote from the one about Graham. Helpful rule for life:
“You should always remember that any time you play tug of war with someone’s tongue, the one who owns the tongue is definitely going to be the winner. ALWAYS.”

He learned this thanks to the dog, who for whatever reason adores Graham and thinks him grabbing her tongue is just the greatest thing that has happened to her since whatever was happening right before he grabbed her tongue. Most things that happen to her are great in her opinion — trips to the vet, kids playing with her, kids hollering “It’s the Menacing Licker! Get her out of here!” as they push her out of their bedroom and slam the door in her face, people feeding her, people eating food that they don’t feed her, naptime, bedtime, run around outside time, put in her crate time… she’s always ready to sign up for any turn of events. She will even volunteer for baths, which she doesn’t appear to enjoy at all once we get her wet and soapy — but still, run the water and hey hey! A dog bath? This has to do with me? Right? I get in here now? THIS IS AWESOME. I know exactly what to do, and I’m in 100%!

Did I tell you about her trying to make friends with a yellowjacket nest? It wasn’t just one brief dumb-dog moment; this was a long term commitment to establishing friendly communication with these tiny stinging creatures. She would beg us to let her outside so she could go visit her new BFFs, even though her BFFs mysteriously lived in this place that stung her. Get out of there, friends! The air right here will sting you! I’ll save you! Unless you want to play? Let’s play! It went on for nearly two weeks last summer until the yellowjackets disappeared, probably taking their queen and relocating to someplace with fewer big yellow dogs inviting them to party all the time.

So that’s what I ended up writing about. Weird. See why so many of these go into the drafts folder?

More sooner than normal, I swear it.

…but I like it. Nicolaus is in classes at a homeschooler enrichment center thingy, where we send our kids every week just so we have a killer answer whenever people ask us how we handle socialization. His homework this week was to write one paragraph about his pet. Here is what he wrote:

Super Luvey is a bird with cuteness powers! She can hypnotize by fluffing up her feathers because it is SO CUTE. If a cat attacks, it ends up being hypnotized into giving her croissants. She is queen of an island that has more nuclear missiles than any other place on Earth. She thinks they are pretty! She can also cuddle people to death by using LASER CUDDLE, concentrating all of her cuddliness. She has sonic tweets that are so loud they can shatter titanium. And of course this small birdie has so much concentrated cuteness that she can turn things into cotton candy. When you are this cute you don’t have to follow the laws of physics.