electric boogaloo

First, before I start the babbling (and it is 1:44 AM. There will be babbling.) I’m going to ask my question:

Do you have any ideas for a kid’s Star Trek party? He likes every series, every ship, every character, every weapon, every bit of science babble, every. single. thing. Please make your ideas simple enough for a lame mom to put together in less than one week.

Here’s what I’ve thought of so far:
1. Make a basic round cake look like the enterprise (duh)
2. Give everyone a communicator thingy to wear on their chest
3. Somehow find the time/skill to sew some tribbles. Hide them all over the place and invent some sort of game involving gathering them up orrrrr them multiplying or… something. I could make this a smaller scale game with little pompoms but again, that’s where my brain leaves off.
4. Some kind of game where if you get stuck wearing the red shirt, you’re out. But how this would actually work? I haven’t gotten that far.
5. Some kind of you know, like decorations and whatever?

So that’s all I’ve got. The kid has beautifully low standards and will jump up and down with excitement over anything to do with the words Star and Trek, but still I think it might be more fun for our guests if the party has some sort of cohesive thing. Right? Of course, none of the other kids are into Star Trek. Plus last year they all ran off and played in the spaceship closet. I should remind myself of that a bunch this week.

Now for the babbling.

There’s a dog curled up tight and pressed against the back of my knees. If your dog is ever running around being silly and getting into things and you need him to stop it, turn your heat down a few degrees. Instant calm cuddledog. Works only in winter.

Winter? I’m tired of winter. It’s painfully cold outside and gloomy and rainy. The boys have been insane this week, and I know it’s because they need to run around outside but oh my lordy lord it is cold outside. Today Kevin bundled them up and took the out for a good long hike.

Hike? I need to hike. It would help me lose weight and get in better shape and generally be a better person. But the problem is it’s too cold outside, because it is winter.

Winter? ERROR INFINITE LOOP. POST TERMINATED.

YOU SMELL LIKE POOP!!
(pause for Nicolaus to make his point)

EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS WRONG.
(further pause)

YOU’RE JUST PRETENDING TO BE MY BROTHER BUT REALLY YOU ARE A ROBOT WHO IS ACTUALLY A BAD GUY WHO SMELLS LIKE POOP AND EVERYTHING YOU SAY IIIIIIIIS!!!! WRONG!!!!!!!

First, I should clarify that my child-made gluten-free birthday cake wasn’t technically cake. But I’d much rather have gluten-free “cake” on my birthday than “gluten-free” cake.

This past week was busy busy busy and yet somehow not at all productive. Nicolaus was sick the first part of the week with a sore throat, fever, chills, and etc. I would have called it the flu except that he was over it completely by Wednesday which is good because that gave us a day to run errands and have fun before Graham got sick on Thursday. Graham was much better by this weekend, which was perfect because around 4:00 Friday afternoon I was feeling achy and wretched. I texted Kevin to share the good news and he wrote back that he too was feeling awesome not.

It was a danged viral relay race. Kevin and I both spent the weekend trying to wrangle two kids who feel ALL BETTER WOOOOO PARTY.

So even though I am trying and wanting so much to be a better housewife person, given the amount of medium-fever lameness we had this week I’m going to call the week a success because we were all alive at the end of the week and none of us were fired, evicted, arrested and/or hospitalized. We worked on reading and writing, listened to stories about Rome, did laundry and dishes most days, ate thousands of meals at home, discovered the wonderful web comic Minus, took Graham to his new swim class before he got sick. And! on Wednesday we learned an important life lesson about scrapbooking stores which is that scrapbook stores are operated by snooty-tooties who don’t like kids even if your kids are being unusually charming and well behaved and aren’t touching anything except to ask how much something costs and then try to buy it with their allowance money. We have learned the same lesson about rubber stamp stores. If you work at one of these stores, can I please recommend that you keep some wine in the breakroom and maybe sip it throughout the day? While you listen to classical music and study a large, beautifully scrapbooked sign that says Seriously. It is MFing PAPER.

You could use glitter letters for the M and the F.

So I was proud of the boys for deciding not to buy anything as a form of protest. We walked out and went next door to a pet store where the boys fell in love with some little albino mice because “We didn’t realize they literally run in little wheels! That is so cute! And they are only $2.00!”

I told them no, because A) the mice are $2 but the cages are $40 and B) Kevin has already said that everyone has a pet except him so he gets to pick the next animal. That means no more pets until we move to a place that allows goats.

So instead the boys spent their money on gumballs and tiny glow in the dark alien toys from the little machine.

Somewhere in there we also watched the state of the union speech (which the boys took from it: “Soon we can expect to get a whole lot of money! Because he said that the banks have to pay back the taxpayers.”), found a free wallet for Nicolaus, took a gift to a friend, started to go for walks and turned back because OMG winter, drank numerous teaspoons of cold medicine, and took turns requesting and offering sympathy. Oh and Graham — maybe because of his cold? — spent an extraordinary time in the time out spot.

Sick people require passive entertainment so we also watched a lot of Star Trek and a new Batman DVD (the Bold and the Brave — highly entertaining and I’m pretty sure starring the dude from Drew Carrey as Batman).

I was feeling guilty for the amount of television they watched this week until I remembered days when I stayed home sick from school as a kid. My dad and I would eat cinnamon toast and watch:
Gomer Pyle
Addams Family
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Andy Griffith show starring Andy Griffith
The Pink Panther cartoon
Looney Toons
The Munsters, even though it wasn’t as funny as the Addams Family
I Dream of Jeanie

There are others I am forgetting. Hey remember TVGuide? Do they still make that? I just had this strong memory of being home sick and studying the TV Guide to figure out my plan for the entire day.

This week I also spent every possible minute working on the new Nerdy Baby products we are going to make this year. At the end of the Christmas rush, Kevin and I started working on lots of ideas — fun. Too fun. Now it’s time to narrow them down and figure out what it would take to actually produce some stuff. Each product idea presents its own special thrills and hassles, particularly since we are trying to expand Nerdy Baby (TM!) to the next level without acquiring more debt and without having things made in China.

If you have ever started a company and/or manufactured anything then you know that these two self-imposed limitations are very… what’s the word? Exciting? Challenging? No, more than challenging. Exciting? No. Impossible?
No.

Oh, I’ve got it! Exciting.

1. Graham’s new hobby is humming loudly. Monotone. MMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm
mmmmmMM
MMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmm

It’s in the background while we talk or drive or eat or do schoolwork. I ask him to PLEASE STOP the loud hum. He stops. Then a minute later I realize I’m tense for some reason and oh my god there is that humming again.

“Graham, what did I ask you to do?”

“Stop loud humming.”

“And what are you doing?”

“I’m speaking in my language.”

“YOU ARE HUMMING.”

“You can’t understand it because it’s not your language.”

Or other times he says it’s the sound of his laser firing and his lasers sound like different things. Or he indignantly claims that he is meditating (the humming is 100% worth it in that instance because I love the way he pronounces the word meditating). Or he says it’s not him making the humming noise, it’s actually a story being played on my computer but it’s skipping and going to fast so it sounds like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmm

However much you think I’m hearing this loud monotone humming noise, I promise that you are way way underestimating. It is so much more humming than you think. He does it between words. He does it while he poops. Which okay — who doesn’t? I’m not sure it’s even possible to poop without loudly humming a non-song. That’s why some people are so weird about pooping in public restrooms.

2. I’ve said before that Graham’s mind works more like Kevin’s. Nicolaus does surprise me sometimes, but even then I feel like I know the path that he walked to arrive at whatever he just said. It’s the same path I would have taken to get to the same sort of place.

Graham doesn’t think along those same paths and he definitely doesn’t arrive at the same places. Like a lot of four year olds he stops and starts over his sentences so you, he stops and starts over and so you, a lot of four year olds? do this thing? where you have to wait a long time because they stop? and start they stop and start over their sentence… ence…ence sentence. Sentence. so you have to patiently wait for them to blurt out the ending. Or kick them like a record player that’s hung up.

So I find myself guessing the ending. I have to stop doing this because with Graham I am never, ever right. We were driving and he says, “Mama I love… I LOVE. I love that. Mama? And Mama? I really love those beautiful… that man’s beautiful. I love that man’s beautiful [unintelligible].”

“That man’s what?”

He started over. I said that I love… You know what I really love? I love that that that that I love that man’s beautiful… Mama? I love that I love you know what? I love that man’s beautiful [unintelligible].”

“His what?”

“I SAID I love I lovvvvve…”

“Graham. You love his beautiful what?”

“I already told you two times.”

“But I couldn’t hear you, sorry. What do you love?”

“That worker man’s beautiful caution cones.”

See what I mean? I don’t know what I expected him to say, but caution cones wasn’t it.

3. His other new hobby is hiding things and then giving us clues to help us find them. He started out hiding his own stuff but quickly figured out that family members are much more excited about playing his game when he hides our things. Hilarious and fun unless it’s something like your shoe or your phone or the few precious minutes that stand between you and being late and oh my god dude where is the dog’s leash??

What sucks is when he honestly doesn’t remember where he put everything. No amount of playing along or begging or time-out giving or threatening to send him to a technical school instead of university can make him find your stuff. All you can do is clean house in detail and hope you’ll run across it and remember that possessions are fleeting and so is age four.

It’s two in the morning. I can’t blame the kids anymore — they sleep plenty thanks to my own personal ultimate child sleep training program (in six short years you too can develop your baby’s perfect sleeptime habits!). So now you will figure out that I’m not tired all the time because I have young children. I’m tired because I’m an idiot who stays up all night. Is there a term for someone who almost deliberately messes up their own lives? I’m a willful insomniac. I rebel against the part of me that says you know, eight hours of sleep really feels great. Yeah WELL. I’ll show you, brain!

Tonight I’ve been reading about this guy Bruner who came up with the same idea I’ve been working on for our curriculum. He called it spiraling, which isn’t quite what I would have called it (are we headed outward? Inward?) but in a lot of my notes I’ve drawn concentric circles, so I think the visual of a spiral is trying to get at a similar thing. I need to get a book and read more, but so far everything I’ve come across that he suggests falls perfectly into the kind of schooling we have naturally formed over here simply by quieting my mind and thinking about the purpose of teaching these kids anything at all. So yeah. Nice to know that an actual professional is well-known for the belief that I’m not permanently screwing up my children by teaching them this way.

Man. I’m tired.

While in Texas my brother and I got into an argument with my mom about the bedtimes we had when we were kids. We remembered bedtime anarchy, staying up as late as we wanted, playing with legos and reading books and eventually watching Nick at Nite (sic). No bedtimes wooooo! But my mom, hippie though she was, remembered putting us to bed at 8:00 so she and dad could watch some lame 80s grownup show. She told me what it was, but now I don’t remember. Any guesses? I want to say it started with a K. Knots Landing? Knight Rider? Kate and Allie?

Once our ma described the uncharacteristically rigid bedtime routine it did sound familiar. After more discussion we realized that a lot of nights she put us to bed at 8:00 but we were punks who didn’t actually go to sleep until many hours later. She insisted that it didn’t matter because BED > SLEEP and then she suggested that I might think about this with my own parenting: the real reason for putting kids to bed at an early hour is that parents need time alone.

Which I agree. But if I put my kids to bed too early, then they wake up at terrible hours of the morning and then my choices are either:
1. Spend no time with Kevin and spend almost no time packing orders at night or
2. Stay up late to visit with him and pack orders, then three or four hours later when the boys announce “It’s morning!”. Die from being tired

So yeah. Boys sleep plenty, but I still don’t. I’m trying to actively notice and change my bratty mental habits. Do you have those? It’s like a compulsion to screw up. It’s the same type of feeling every time, so I’m hoping that noticing and articulating them will help me feel more stupid the next time it happens. Here are some I’ve noticed so far:
* I will do that later
* Yuck, this is intimidating so I shouldn’t do it right now
* The person I’m talking to doesn’t want to hear about this
* I’ll keep this object because I can envision myself using it/wearing it/making something out of it
* I should buy this, it will solve everything
* If we left now we’d get there early. That means that I have plenty of time before we leave and don’t need to finish getting everyone ready.
* I can’t stop doing this right this second because I am not at an obvious stopping point. If I stop reading in the middle of a paragraph or stop drawing at a weird point or walk away from an email that I’ve mostly written but haven’t yet sent, police might bust down my door and arrest me. Or I’ll have a seizure. Or a comet will smash into me. All of those things would only delay things even further and so you will have to wait a few minutes until I am at a stopping point.
* I am only going to sleep for five minutes.
* I should eat this yummy thing/drink this soda pop because I need to

There are more, but this is a start. It’s almost a superstitious type of feeling, and working on this is an extension of my mission to shine a big rational light on all of the silly magic that I secretly believe in. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll stop believing in all of it. I just want to make on-purpose decisions about what stays and what goes. Because damn, today I was late to pick up the new baby books and then I drove 20 minutes north to a post office and let the lady calculate postage for everything before I realized my wallet was at home, then had to drive to a different post office and then back up 20 minutes north again to run the errands I’d meant to run before missing my wallet. My mind has got to start being more organized than this.