January first I’m going to start posting photos again. The backlog is driving me crazy. And one of these days I’m going to scan and post my various silly little cartoons. Yay, cartoons. I also want to figure out how to put some little videos online. Wouldn’t that be fun? That’s the problem with this being a hobby though – kids and Kevin come first, paying work comes next, Internet comes third. Bummer, I know.

That’s not what I’m here to write about though. I’m here to write about my kid and Christmas, and my other kid, and my husband and why I love him.

The other day Kevin and I left our kids at home with my inlaws so we could sneak off to Target and buy a few things to put under the tree Christmas morning. Except we kind of freaked out. Nicolaus is just at this perfect age for Christmas, and he’s so damned cool and sweet and appreciative of things. Once we were there, faced with all the things that we knew he would love, we could not stop.

His gifts include:
Two 24-piece puzzles, one Sesame Street outer space, and one with all the different Care Bears on it
A huge block of modelling clay
A play-doh fun factory
A little lego set
A set that includes a 4′x5′ tent, a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a folding chair, and a compass. All with rocket ships on them.
A big stuffed horse
A little stuffed elephant
A little stuffed tiger
2 Richard Scarry DVDs

We spent close to a hundred dollars on the little goof. Meanwhile Graham got a beautiful stuffed rabbit with velvet ears, and a cute teether. If money spent is what matters, it appears that we love Nicolaus roughly five times as much as we love Graham. Although that’s not really a fair way to look at it. A more meaningful way to look at it is by weight. Nicolaus weighs 29 pounds, and so per pound we spent $3.45. Graham weighs 13 pounds, so we spent $1.54 per pound of Graham. So really we only love Nicolaus a little more than twice as much as his brother. Way better than five times.

Or! We could look at the amount spent per month on this planet. Nicolaus has been here 34 months, so we spent $2.94 per month of time we’ve had to grow to know and love Nicolaus.

Graham has been here less than three months. So we spent $7.27 for each month that we’ve known this person, indicating that we love Graham more.

Really we’re going to need to chart this over several years to get some better numbers on this. If this journal is still around in a few years, I promise you there will be graphs. I’ve heard of kids growing up and bickering as adults over who was the most loved when they were children. I think that it a tragic waste of energy, and the parents are certainly to blame. If they had simply taken the time to document things like Christmas spending over the years, or to even scrawl in a journal now and then helpful musings like, “You know, I really like Alfonso best.” a lot of arguing and unspoken bitterness could be avoided.

But that’s really not what I’m trying to write about. Christmas is about much more than buying gifts for your children. It’s about finding joy and excitement in things that make a gloomy season bright and gay. Or in some instances, super gay.

Yesterday we were sitting in the car outside my parents’ shop, discussing the logistics of meeting up with my mother for dinner and did we want to, or did we want to run errands, or what. I was a little frazzled and overwhelmed by the options, and Kevin was saying, “I don’t know, it’s really up to you what we –” when suddenly he looked up into the rearview mirror and gasped loudly. “Oh my God! Nicolaus!”

I would have panicked except his voice was full – and I mean fill it to the rim with Brim FULL – of glee.

“Nicolaus!” He was undoing his seatbelt as quickly as possible, “It’s THE WIENERMOBILE.” I turned around to see Nicolaus’ face, which pretty much said, What the fuck is the wienermobile?. I shrugged and looked past him to see that yes, yes there was a giant car shaped like a hot dog coming towards us. It parked in the parking lot and the driver started blowing a shrill whistle.

I looked at the driver’s seat. Kevin was gone. A second later, the door next to Nicolaus slid open and Kevin quickly unbuckled him while gasping, “The WIENERMOBILE! THE WIENERMOBILE. NICOLAUS. It’s the WIENERMOBILE.”

Graham and I sat in the car while Kevin and Nicolaus ran over to check out the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. I watched them from a distance, and maybe this makes me a pervert but I don’t think Kevin has ever looked so sexy and adorable as he did at that moment. He’s just really cute and an awesome dad, and watching him show something so fucking random to his kid with such insane excitement – I can’t explain it. Very attractive, and no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was standing next to a 27 foot long wiener. I swear. Real mature, by the way.

It was 30 degrees outside, cold enough that after a three minutes of standing in awe before the giant hot dog-shaped vehicle, Nicolaus told him he wanted to go inside. A few minutes later it drove away, and Kevin watched sadly and said, “And just like that, the Wienermobile was gone.”

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

"The internet says you need to cut Mouse's nails."

"What? I just trimmed them a couple of weeks ago."

"The internet says we should trim them again."

"But Mouse hates having his nails clipped."

"The internet doesn't care."

"Where are the clippers?"

"Hell if I know. They keep disappearing."

Nicolaus spent the night at my parents’ house this morning, where we send him occasionally to receive his critical doses of rock and roll trivia and Communist propoganda. This morning there was an email in my inbox from my mom, sent sometime after midnight, which said, “He went right to sleep after we read Yellow Submarine.”
Well, we have to provide balance you know? Kevin’s parents expose him to things like fishing and taking care of chickens and hating Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, I’m here with Graham and no Nicolaus. The house is too too quiet.

But I just learned something neat about Mr.Graham: When Nicolaus isn’t here, Graham sleeps… well, indefinitely. It’s 10:30 am and he’s still curled in the middle of my bed in a deep sleep. This isn’t the same as the big “sleeping through the night” thing that parents wait for, because he still wakes up to be fed a few times, but still. Other than eating, he’s been asleep for the last 13 hours. Normally we start the day at 7:30, because one member of this household is insane. Normally Graham wakes up then too, wide-eyed and all smiles, ready for the day. But no, it turns out that left to his own devices he’ll sleep all morning, squirming occasionally and making cute little yawny noises and then snuggling back down into the mattress.

Nicolaus was our ironic child. Our haha-isn’t-it-funny-Tiffany-and-Kevin-are-so-quiet-and-lazy-but-now-they-have-given-birth-to-something-noisy-and-awake child. And that’s been good for us. For reaasons that aren’t altogether clear right this second, given that I’m laying peacefully in bed listening to the rain drizzle outside while I wirelessly check my email, but still. Good for us. Definitely.

But Graham is our good karma baby. The baby we rightfully deserved given that we were both easy babies, babies who worried our parents by sleeping so much that they held mirrors up to our noses to make sure we were breathing.

Ah, he’s waking up.

Wait. No. Back asleep. Dude, this baby rules.

Graham's laying on top of me. I'm trapped. We own many things that were designed for baby holding – I specifically remember very urgently wanting these things before he was born. Looking at us now, you would think that I harrassed my father for weeks to PLEASE go get that awesome handmade wooden cradle out of storage and fix it up for us so that after the baby was born I'd have a beautiful place in our living room to store clean clothes.

And the crib that Kevin and Nicolaus assembled? The one we spent all summer rearranging our house to make room for? I'm so glad they did that because it's a very handy place to keep blankets and clothes that Graham hasn't grown into yet. Sometimes I put him in it while I read to Nicolaus, but he only tolerates it for maybe 15 minutes.

We have a bassinet in our room, next to our bed, which is a wonderful place to put burp cloths, my nightgown, shards of glass – basically whatever we want to be sure and keep away from the baby. There's also the carseat, which we used when Nicolaus was a baby as a convenient. safe place to put him sometimes. For Graham it's a convenient – uh, nothing. He hates it. He doesn't mind it so long as it is being used for its documented purpose, but once he realizes that he's in the carseat but not in a moving vehicle he starts making very pathetic noises. This includes stopping at stop signs or drive-through windows. I don't know how many times I've heard Kevin plead over the sound of a screaming baby, "DUDE. Graham. Seriously? IT'S ONLY A RED LIGHT."
Thousands.

There's the bouncy seat, which is basically a little baby hammock with toys on it. It's in the bathroom where I had the hilarious idea that I might someday take a bath. The vision was: Me, in the tub, without a baby. Baby, in the bouncer, next to the tub, gleefully cooing and waving his arms – or maybe sleeping peacefully. Currently on the bouncy seat (I just checked): a towel, my hair bandana, a roll of toilet paper and a plastic alligator.

There's a swing. It's a travel swing, so I can easily fold it up and move it from room to room. This is convenient because I can move it from the kitchen to the living room, allowing me to hear Graham say FUCK YOU to the swing idea from multiple vantage points.

So in an 800 square foot area we have six APA approved items designed to hold babies, all complete with safety-tested, SIDS-free firm breathable foam mattresses and mesh sides and everything else you need to make sure your baby doesn't die from his mother being totally neurotic and paranoid. But Graham wants to be on or with a person at all times. If a person is not available, he wants to be propped up in the corner of the couch so he can see anything interesting that might happen in the event that we should suddenly get a life and have interesting things happen. Even though nothing really exciting or interesting happens here lately unless you count Nicolaus teaching Mouse how to be a penguin as interesting, which come to think of it, I do.

I'm so exhausted. I have eight hundred things I'd like to post about but it's hard to type with a baby on me. I also have work to do but oh man. I'm so exhausted. I should be working, or wrapping presents, or getting up to get ready for bed at least but instead I'm laying flat on the couch with a baby sideways across my chest and a laptop perched on my stomach. We look ridiculous, but here we are because what can I do? He's cute and warm and if I move he'll cry. And he's smiling in his sleep. I'm trapped.

You love the musical instruments that are hanging on the wall. Right now there’s a banjo, a ukulele that belogns to Nicolaus, and an acoustic guitar. Maybe it’s just the shapes and the contrast of the light colors against our cobalt walls, but you’ve been oohing and waving and laughing at them for a solid thirty minutes. That’s a long stretch in baby time, impressive because unlike most baby attractions, the instruments aren’t moving or spinning or lit up in any way, and they aren’t accompanied by creepy midi music versions of Pacobel’s Cannon. We rarely even play them these days. But you love them more than you love the light in our bedroom ceiling fan. And you love that light in the fan more than you love me, which makes sense because now that you mention it I seem to remember you gestating in that light’s swollen womb.

If you turn out to be a musician, we will look back on this entry and read lots of significance into your early fascination with stringed instruments. If not, well, I guess we’ll say, “hmm, he was off to an okay start – what went wrong?” “Whew, that was a close one.”