They were in their post-fruit-eating bath, for the good of humanity and beige chenille couches everywhere. Graham loves bath time… we have to keep the bathroom door shut to stop him from crawling in there and trying to hoist himself into the tub. So he was thrilled to be in the bath with his brother, who was sitting cross-legged (”Indian Style” is no longer an acceptable term because it sends the wrong and sad message to kids that drinking and gambling are okay) in the bath next to him.

After a few minutes of splashing and cuteifying everything, Nicolaus started playing this game where he grabbed any toy within range and put it in his lap. Normal pointless brotherly keepaway stuff. Except awesome because he announced: “I’m the Suck Man! I’m just a – a suckophant.”

“Mmm-hmmm.” Oh man. Only good could come of this.

“Because IIiiiiiii am the one they call MR.SUCK.” He made a sucking noise and pulled another toy into his lap.

“Mr.Suck?”

“Mr. Suck!! Because I just suck so much.”

“Really!” By now he’s laughing like a crazy person, and I’m laughing too. Even Graham is giggling at how much his brother sucks.

“Yuhuh. I’m the one who sucks and sucks. I suck so much and everyone says Oooooh no here is Mr.Suck! And what did he do THAT for? He sucks everything and now the bath is empty. Because you know what? I’m a sucker! And I just SUCK.”

Man alive. Right this minute he’s in his bed being extra extra good and cute because he wants donuts in the morning. So he’s in there talking and looking at books and NOT yelling for me to bring him stuff or lay with him or take him to the bathroom or blah, blah or blah. A peaceful bedtime rocks the pants off of everything. But just sitting here writing about the one they call Mr.Suck makes me want to run in there and hug him and tell him dude you are fucking hilarious and I love you.

But I won’t. Because I kind of want donuts in the morning too and if I go in there he’ll start drama and wind up becoming the one they call Mr.Sorryasswhoblewthedonutdeal.

1. They are not kitchen tongs, or thongs, or however you spell it. They are Fork Chops.

2. Graham doesn’t just screech with joy at his accomplishment. He SHRIEKS and squeals and laughs. And then knocks them over and screams with delight. He is more excited about blocks than I have ever been about anything in my entire life.

3. The bears weren’t getting violin lessons. Bears can’t play the violin, duh. He was instructing the dog.

4. Mouse was in fact wearing a toddler hat, and he does in fact care a great deal. The hat is now on top of the refridgerator where it will never be able to be bother another dog, ever again.

It’s hot. When it’s hot and you’re broke you have to make your own joy. There’s a rainbow sheet hung over the dining room table and chairs to create a cave for bears. That’s as far as I got on coming up with fun activities for the day.

Graham is stacking blocks and screeching with joy. Cheap thrill.

Nicolaus is chasing imaginary bears around the dining room with two pairs of kitchen thongs and one of those giant pool noodle things. Which reminds me, if you’re ever thinking of buying us a gift and you start to think that maybe what we need is a six foot long piece of foam with a phallic-looking spiderman on the end of it, you know, thanks but we’re set. I keep hoping he’ll hit Graham or Mouse with it so I can justify taking it away. It creeps me out.

Oooh! Idea! Once a year there should be a holiday where Santa Claus comes in at night and TAKES a bunch of toys that kids probably won’t even miss. Then maybe Santa could sell the toys on eBay and like, send us all a check or something. Next presidential election, I’m voting for whichever candidate promises to give us something like that.

Now Nicolaus is giving the bears a violin lesson. I don’t think the bears should pay him though. He SUCKS.

Graham stops the blocks to dance to the horrible music.

Mouse is asleep. He’s wearing a baby sun hat. He doesn’t seem to care.

I’m sitting on the couch in front of the oscilating fan, surfing the internet lazily and thinking holy cripes, it’s not even the hottest part of the day yet. Nicolaus keeps trying to convince me that we should go outside. “Hey, you wanna get out? The sky is your favorite color: TURQUOISE.”

Yeah well, you know what else is turquoise? The kitchen! Which is air conditioned.

“But I just want to show my violin to the lizards.” We have lizards living on our front patio. See?

Oops. There are tears. I hurt someone’s feelings by suggesting that someone’s actions towards his brother were less than nice. You hurt my feelings when you say things like that. I’m not a mean kid! Stop saying things like that to me. Oh my. Okay, he’s over it but clearly self-entertainment time is now over. I think it might be movie time. Followed by watermelon time. Followed urgently by bath time. Followed by hey! Bed time! Haha just kidding, it’s only 3:00. Followed by holy crap there are seriously two and a half more months of this weather.

It doesn’t matter how little you are

Or how cute

Or how squishy.

Whether you hug me really tight and coo when I pick you up is completely beside the point.

And I don’t even care how wonderful you smell, even right after a nice bath in that Johnson’s stuff that smells like fresh babies.

No matter what

It is never okay to point up into my nostrils
and say “HAIRRRR.”

We spent this weekend completely Nicolausless. He’s with my inlaws. They’re crazy, yes, but it’s mostly a benevolent/harmless kind of crazy unless you are my pants in which case you are now too tight and too short because hi! I’m Kevin’s mom and I did you a favor and did the laundry! In hot water, because cold water doesn’t kill germs Oh and PS. Here’s a kitten. Hope you don’t mind, she bites kids and dogs. Oh and PPS. Doctors don’t want you to know that vitamins cure cancer! Oh and PPPS. The liberal media flooded New Orleans to make George Bush look bad.

But when it comes to their grandkids, it’s a good kind of crazy. The kind of crazy that makes people buy a golf cart because they bet the grandkids will love riding it, or makes them have a huge pile of dirt delivered onto their front lawn so that young archeologists can dig and play in it. Awesome-crazy.

They have had him since Friday. It’s been awfully quiet here. I thought I would get a tremendous amount of artwork done because even though I like watching him hold flashlights up to his chest and run back and forth across the length of the house whilst shouting that he has HEADLIGHTS because he is a famous race car, trying to work near that kind of activity is simply not a good home-based business practice. It’s not his fault – I had the same trouble focusing at my old job when I worked in business systems and the sales guys would do the exact same thing in the hallway next to my cubicle. There were many days when, between the stomping up and down and the yelling “I’m Lightening McQUEEEEeeeeeeeen!!!!”, I accomplished fuck all. Which was fine, really, since my job was to draw flowcharts for systems that the sales guys were supposed to use and they were much too busy being race cars and doing eachother with the gay sex to ever actually use the systems we designed for them anyway. So it all worked out. Except the part where our entire team was eliminated from the organization, but whatever.

So with Nicolaus gone, I had big plans to accomplish big things. But it turns out that when you have two kids, getting rid of one of them still leaves you with 80% of the workload. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but it’s true. He’s coming back tomorrow and the house is still a mess and my hair still needs to be dyed and I still need to run errands and do a bunch of artypants pants pants.

We had fun hanging out with Graham by himself though. He’s babbling up all kinds of crazy baby babble that’s normally hard to hear what with the race car running around. He growls constantly, and I swear he’s trying to say some things. UP. Ball. Light. Hairrrrrrr. Maybe – But we’re not sure. He mostly crawls around beating the hell out of Nicolaus’ toys, grinning and growling like a weird little tiger. GRAWR! The sales guys at my old job never did anything that cute, and I find it very distracting.

But! Big things are in the works. I got a great deal on printing starting… well, now. So I’ve permanently lowered the prices on the Nerdy Baby ABC cards. Please, please buy them and tell your friends to buy them and use your company credit card to order like a stack of 500 of them to put in the supply closet where you work instead of those little yellow notepads.

Incidentally, if you paid my horrendous early adopter price, please get in touch with me. I’d like to send you a thank you gift.

I’m also working on mockups for a new Nerdy Baby project and have been trying to figure out publishing and whatnot. It’s a book, so do I publish it myself? Do I sell it to some fancypants wizzywazzit publisher? Without limiting my options to expand the product line and/or getting screwed? And so on.

That’s as far as I got though, on account of all of the wretched cuteness. Grrrawrrr!