electric boogaloo

You took the boys fishing today, out in the aluminum boat with your dad. Same thing you did last year which means now you’re stuck. It’s a Father’s Day tradition and now you have to do it forever. Just like how I started doing this annual blog post full of you and now if I didn’t do it one year you’d would be like wait — was I not a good dad this year? So now you’re stuck. Fishing and me saying nice things about you. Sucks to be you!

As I sifted through zillions of messy folders of photos from this past year, I only found a few that show your face. You hate having your picture taken and I don’t like hassling you about it, but it’s important for the kids to know what you looked like before the chipmunk mauling of ‘22. So I sort of feel like a spy, sneaking snapshots when it’s not too annoying. But the result is kind of cool — I don’t have any posed “smile for the camera!” pictures of you. All I have are collected bits that show what you do on a normal saturday afternoon with your kids. It’s more real this way.

Except the pictures are totally silent. That part is bullshit.

This year has been a noisy one in parenting land. Going from last summer when we had a two year old who didn’t talk much and an ornery five year old to having a very chatty three year old and a mostly cheerful six year old was a full 12-month process.

Like always, I think that you don’t think you’re a good enough father. Is that a common dad thing? Or are your standards insane? I can’t tell, but it doesn’t matter much because you are the person and the father that you are — regardless of what most people do. I don’t know what you think you should be like. Never grumpy? Never tired? Perfectly in tune all the time, able to discipline one child with a firm but fair hand while at the same time bathing and putting together a snap-together model of the Titanic with the other child?

I’m not being a smartass; I really don’t know what you worry that you aren’t doing. Because from my perspective, you’re exactly what our kids need from you. You love the neverending heck out of them, you treat them with respect and dignity while still insisting that they behave like members of a society. You encourage them to be good to each other, to laugh at themselves, and to keep trying things that are hard. They are happy when you are home.

1. Thank you for not running away screaming into the night even though there are days when no one would blame you. I don’t care how much we love ours, the brutal fact is that all little kids are hard to be around. You spend time with them even when they are being assholes, and you never blame them for being assholes. Whenever a phase gets out of hand, you want to look at what we’re doing wrong. What should we be doing differently? What do they need that we aren’t giving them? Then we work on it, and it gets better and they start working on new horrible things they can do all the time.

2. Thank you for raising our kids to not take life too seriously. God, I take daily life too seriously. Your humor sets a tone for our best days. This will sound dorky to say but I really think when the boys are grown and they remember their childhood, they will remember laughing and joking and being picked on and being allowed to pick back.

On the train to New York; boys demonstrating play doh coming out of their noses.

3. Thank you for both your faith and your skepticism towards the Ard School of Arts and Sciences. Without your faith in me to homeschool our kids, we’d be missing out on this. And without your skepticism I wouldn’t be so driven to do a good job and prove you wrong.

Nicolaus, upset because seagulls do not trust him, receives words of comfort.

4. Thanks for being so different from me. The kids need that. You encourage their love of nature, science, music. You encourage them to try new foods, you are totally honest with them all the time, except for the Santa business. And they know that you are the one with the cooler games on your iPhone.

Graham and you by the campfire.

5. The boys thank you for gently letting me know when I’m being a grumpy mother for no reason. And I thank you for doing so without using the actual word bitch.

Out in the horrible fucking cold wet awful horribleness, because the boys wanted to see the snow.

6. Thanks for keeping all of Graham’s imaginary knives in your truck. They would clutter up the house.

At the carwash.

7. Thank you for carrying Graham when his feet are tired even though your feet are so tired that they hurt so bad that you went to a doctor to find out why and he made you do a bunch of things to your feet like soak your feet and get shots in your feet and stretch and rest and jesus, carrying an extra 35 pounds can’t help.

8. Thank you for setting up your studio. It has been two years, dude. Nicolaus is very excited that you are going to start making things again… he remembers watching you work. He admires you so much for making jewelry and still proudly tells people that you make things out of metal. I know it’s hard to get back into the swing of it, and I know we don’t really have a big enough space for you but you are awesome for giving it a shot. It teaches the boys a lot, and it helps them to know you better.

9. Thank you for the puppy. That has to do with fatherhood in some wonderful, meaningful way which I was going to connect to the rest of this post but omg the puppy wants to play fetch and he is so cute!

One day I’ll get you a pet that you enjoy this much. We’ll have some land, with trees and water. We’ll have a garden and a tiny jewel of a house. There’ll be a porch littered with art and decoration. We’ll have a couple of chickens for eggs, we’ll have a goat and another dog or two. And if there is any way we can swing it I promise you I will get you that talking half-chipmunk half-dachsund that you dreamed about the other night. Because look! I have two kids! So see? Dreams do come true.

I love you, Kevin, so damned much.

Free-range is a legitimate parenting style, right? I mean, I’m involved - but more as loose supervision and lively conversation than actual parenting. Oh, in fact! My parenting last week was almost exactly like being with my two favorite college roommates; they’d come in and I’d have the dining room table covered with my work, exploded in a fan shape surrounding my favorite chair just outside of the kitchen, where the sink was full of all of our dishes.

First Nina would come in and we’d talk about how I thought her new boyfriend was a jerk and same goes for his jerky friend Kevin. Haha! Jerks. Then she’d say bad things about the other roommate and I’d listen sympathetically but wouldn’t really have the energy or time to offer useful advice, much less intervene.

Then she’d leave to go listen to a book on tape. And Tanya would bounce in and talk a lot really fast about this hilarious idea she had while she was walking through the muddy field and oh my gosh wouldn’t it be hilarious if we went to Denny’s and pretended to be from the future but were as subtle and real about it as possible? And I’d look down and read a few paragraphs and look back up and she’d be wearing completely different clothes.

It was fun and it worked, except our apartment was always trashed and I wasn’t responsible for feeding them. So yeah, the last week has been dodgy in the parenting department. And the housekeeping/wife-being/healthy eating/focus on anything other than putting out fires department.

Still, I weirdly enjoyed the boys all week. We talk all the time, we wonder things out loud, we play and make fun of each other. We argue, we lose our tempers and say dumb things then right away take it all back. It’s banter, which is my number one favorite kind of conversation.

And really it was weirdly neat to stand back and observe them while I worked. I watched and listened to them play, heard them weave little lessons into their games from the messy threaded soup of things we’ve studied this year.

Our homeschool curriculum consists of DK books and wikipedia. We have fun but I often worry that I’m not doing enough structured work, not doing enough to make sure they know how to read and do skills… you know? But whenever we sit down and do that stuff, it feels like we are playing school. The rest of the time we’re learning. Me too, I’m learning. I go between feeling confident and brave about our approach and wondering how bad it would be if I managed to somehow not teach them anything. So it’s nice once in awhile to see evidence that it works.

This week Nicolaus:
Realized that an abacus with 100 beads is a great way to count coins. He suddenly knows what each coin is worth, and can add them up. He had one day where he could do it astoundingly well, then the very next day he couldn’t do it at all. Then the day after that he was working on it again.

I love watching kids master something that is a reach for them. You see them digging a rut, then driving back through it over and over until it all makes sense and becomes part of the terrain. Oooh metaphors written when I’m tired suck bad.

He also made up his own culture, danced around and told me new Star Trek episodes, asked for help writing his own Greek myth, and generally dazzled me with his silliness and sweetness all week.

If you have a four or five year old who is making you crazy, please re-read that paragraph. Oh holy moly, we are enjoying age six.

Meanwhile, Graham:
1. Gives his daddy a pistol every day as he leaves for work, so that bad guys won’t kill him. The pistol is invisible, and Kevin says he now has hundreds of them in his truck.

2. Loves to cook pretend food. He makes me things like bagels and asks me to pretend I am daddy so I can eat wheat. He has a better grasp of what a gluten-free diet means than any waiter I’ve encountered.

So this week I took fifteen minutes to make him a play kitchen out of two big cardboard boxes. While I sawed out the refrigerator door, he stood behind me with his hands on my shoulder and said, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

3. He brought me an oversized kids’ math book and asked me to read it to him. Before I opened it he told me earnestly:
“I don’t know anything.”

“Well that’s okay, this book is a great way to learn stuff.” I opened it to the first page, “Alright, how many hats are in this picture?”

“What’s a hat?”

“See the hats?”

“What’s a hat?”

“What?”

“I don’t know anything.”

Then we moved down lower on the page, past counting single items and into counting groups. The book had big pictures of pairs of shoes. I tried explaining it, failed, and came back to: Okay, Graham. When I say ‘go get your shoes!’ how many shoes do you bring me?

“Four.”

“No… how many shoes do you put on when we leave?”

“Four.”

“Graham. How many feet do you have?”

“I’m a kitty. I have four feet.”

“Ohhhh okay, so you have four. Now… what the book is saying is that if you have a group of four shoes…”

“Actually, I decided I’m really a monkey.”

“Oh! A monkey. So now you have two feet. Okay so now when I tell you to go get your shoes on, how many shoes do you get?”

“Zero.”

“Zero?”

“Monkeys feet are really… actually hands. So I don’t have feet. I just have hands.”

Counting objects was making me tired. “Should we see what’s on the next page now?”

“No, I like this page.”

I can’t decide if this exchange means that I should definitely homeschool this kid, or definitely NOT homeschool this kid, but see? We’re having fun.

I’m sitting in an old chair, which I swear used to be more comfortable than this. I’m sitting here watching the dog walk around the living room and mess with different stuff that’s on the floor. Each time he picks something up he looks at me like yes? And most of the time I say “AAAA.” which means No that’s not yours even though it looks like a dog toy and is on the floor it belongs to one of those noisy horrible other guys who live here. But some things he picks up - a piece of string, a wood chip, his own teeny tiny tennis ball - are fine and oh that makes him very happy. He runs around, buries it under the futon then drags it back over to me so I can throw it a few times before he abandons it and grabs something else.

Last night I taught him down. It took fifteen seconds, which made me realize maybe I’m not working hard enough to train this dog. Can you imagine how much he could have learned by now if I’d spent an hour a day? He’d know more than twenty thousand tricks by now.

This is nothing of what I was going to write about. My brain is so hammered down these days, I am so beaten up and flattened by the end of the day that I can’t even think. There are problems, boring business-related problems, that are giving me this awful case of the upset crazybrain. Add to that frustration over the gluten-free diet which mostly works except about once a week when my body spends a day rejecting everything that I have ever eaten. When that happens I want to give up and eat whatever and just feel like whatever because it’s not working and this sucks.

And while business stuff is making my dreams so stressful that I wake up exhausted and my stomach has me tied in a knot, in the background there are all of these wonderful circus acts going on around me. They keep me from losing my mind, even though oh my god their acts are loud and exhausting and are punctuated with spilled drinks and shouts for help.

So at some point every day I decide grrrrrrrrscrew it! Like Tony the Tiger but less great and more screw it. We have to leave this house. So I put clothes on Graham and we all go pee and gather up the dog and everything and we go. As soon as we leave, someone is thirsty but that’s too bad! we can’t turn back now! We’re almost to the car, the apartment’s escape velocity is too high. GO, just go! Does the space shuttle ever go back for shit they forgot?

So that’s why my car has all the Wendy’s cups in it.

Woah, we are way off in the weeds here. This is supposed to be a photo post. See what stress is doing to my posting abilities?

Pictures! With my new phone I’ve been grabbing snapshots of our days.

Like this dorky little puppy:

And my kids on the new playground, which the boys call “Dangerous Park” because it features so many cool ways for a young child to help us reach our annual deductible.

Almost every week we go to a bluegrass jam. The boys can’t play a dang thing, but they sure love to saw away in there with the rest of the band.

And sometimes Kevin and Graham wash the car while the rest of us sit inside and watch:

Roux supervises closely:

My children dress themselves. Bonus points will be awarded if you know who Nicolaus is dressed as:

And monstrous bonus points awarded if you can tell me who Graham is dressed as:

because honest to god, I have no idea. Backwards shoe man? You can’t tell in the picture, but his backpack was upside down as well. It has his name on it so it says something like WVHV\d-). I know there’s a way to flip text upside down but it’s 3 in the morning and google is probably closed, and even if not I don’t want to bother them. You get the idea. Name upside down.

And dangling from the backpack are about a dozen happy boys. They are tiny plastic keychains made to look like miniature children. Graham collects them.

What’s that? You want MORE pictures? And for me to shut up with the tired-lady commentary? Alright, since you said you want more…

Here are Nicolaus and Lovey pretending to be hummingbirds.

And here are some nice trees at the park.

So there! My life is filled with many peaceful and awesome moments that don’t make me feel like a repousse’ piece gone wrong.
But mostly, my days are made up of this:

and this:

“Hurry up, Roux. Hurry up. HURRY UP. Hurry up. For the love of — really? You have to check every square inch before you can pick a spot to pee on? Dude, you already checked there. YES, you did. You’re worse than my mother choosing curtains.”

And that my friends, is the true meaning of Christmas.

It’s like one of those problem-solving matrix thingies from elementary school. Suzy in Oregon wanted two sets of 123 cards and one set of ABC cards. Penelope in North Carolina wanted a prime number poster. Horace the Elephant wanted a Newton’s Law poster. Suzy got one set of each, Penelope got a counting poster and a Newton’s Law poster. Horace got a prime number counting chart and a nice thank you note for his patience.

I am still untangling the mess I made over the last two weeks. The lesson I’ve learned is to never, ever try to fill orders in the two days surrounding a migraine. Of course that means predicting the migraine ahead of time. Maybe there’s an app for that?

I’m making everything right. That’s my customer service policy: Fix the living heck out of everything and shine a super bright happy sunshine-ray flashlight all over any customer who has any teeny problem because I love them and it sucks when you buy something and don’t get what you expected. So yeah. If you ordered anything from me in the last two weeks and experienced wonkiness, please accept my apologies. And let me know. Tiffany fix.

In the meantime, every evening I’ve been spending a little time practicing sewing. I suck all of the world’s shit at sewing. I suck so bad that if thread weren’t so cheap, it would be a tragic waste of our family’s precious resources for me to even be trying. But I keep trying because it’s fun to do things that make me feel stupid. I mean besides running a business, parenting, training a puppy, trying to use Excel to do even basic things, reading the manual for my camera, reading a map of my own town, and thinking about what it’s going to be like when I go to SciFoo this summer.

So far I’ve made: A sad stuffed owl, a weird and very lumpy plush monster, several failed mini-pouches for carrying credit cards, one semi-succesful mini-pouch thing (it looks great but came out a little smaller than I needed), and one wrap skirt. The wrap skirt is made of navy blue broadcloth ($1.75 a yard!) and features a pocket, fetching lime green trim, and possible the most horrifying craftsmanship of any skirt ever made. I even tried to add a button hole using the four-step button hole maker setting, but that ended in hundreds of civilian deaths and an area of scorched, unfarmable land several miles across. No good.

Kevin keeps saying I need to start simpler and make like what? Napkins? Jerk! I will sew us a HOUSE. That we can live in! After that I will sew us a helicopter, followed by a chicken coop and a riding lawn mower. Who will be calling me too ambitious then? No one, that’s who.

So here is a chart showing days of the week, starting with M for Monday which was May 19. No, 18. Sorry. A normal level of human suburbanite happiness is indicated for your reference.

Oh and R = Thursday and U = Sunday because I like labels to have the same number of letters so the spacing isn’t all wonky. Even though I just took up lots of space here explaining that just now. See why I don’t have a corporate job anymore?

Now here is my mood, with key events labeled along the way:

Adding to the stress was Graham, age three:

Nicolaus was oblivious to all of the turmoil. He’s been upbeat lately:

When things are hard, my already limited ability to focus and prioritize completely dissolves and I just react from one moment to the next. Here is how I ended up allocating my energy during this period:

For comparison, here is Graham’s energy budget over the last two weeks:

Nicolaus’ energy was better spent, I think:

I don’t want you to think that I don’t love Kevin just because he hasn’t been included. It’s just that I’ve spent so much time in a teeny little weird emotional tunnel that I can only guess at what he’s been focused on. Here are my best estimates:

So yeah. My Aunt Honey died very suddenly from a heart attack, and we’ve all been trying to absorb that. It’s so wrong. People are supposed to get sick and then decline gradually and then take a turn for the worse and then oh! Recover almost completely! And then get suddenly much much worse until they are in so much pain that everyone is relieved for them when they finally pass away. That is how considerate people die. Just earlier this month, we lost my great Aunt Barbara — but she cared enough to prepare us all with a long, slow decline. It was sad and surreal to finally say goodbye to her, but it wasn’t jarring.

My poor mother already had bronchitis when she found out that her sister had died. Crying made her cough which made her tired which made her sleep which made her want to jump up and go get on a plane and go be with her sister’s son and fix everything. She kept trying to get to San Antonio and got as far as holding a ticket and handing it to the person, but then almost passed out in the jetway because our bodies have incredible ways of saying to us Seriously, sweetie. Go the fuck home and rest.

She went home. She rested. Things are slowly returning to normal for everyone, but life is weird without my aunt being on this planet. Who is going to send me anti-establishment emails about vitamins?

It just sucks. I wasn’t able to get to the funeral, but I woke up at dawn one morning and wrote a eulogy because doing nothing feels so useless. I need to honor her in some tangible way. I have half a mind to go hold up a sign at the clinic down the street. The sign would say: Look, I Don’t Know Your Situation And I Really Can’t Say That I Know What Is Right Because This Is All Very Morally Complicated. But My Aunt Really Hopes You Will Not Do This Abortion.

Or maybe I should just donate to March of Dimes? Or run around town and hug all of the babies? Because my goodness, that crazy lady loved her some babies.