WITH CUTE!

Paint horse… (although I should mention that after weeks of wanting to be a horse, Nicolaus now insists that he is in fact a puppy who is pretending to be a horse. I think he is officially fucking with us on the whole halloween dress up tradition.)

Horse’s owner…

Nicolaus’ pinto pony costume:
White turtleneck shirt – $5.88
Brown leggings – $3
Yarn for mane and tail – $2.50
Felt ears – .20

Graham’s costume:
3/4 yard of scrap fabric – $.80
Package of feathers – $1
Package of little metal bird thingies – $1

So the total cost for two costumes was $83. That figure includes all of the random unrelated bullshit I had to buy because we walked into Target, and the other assorted bullshit I had to buy because the yarn and the fabric came from Walmart. Total amount does not include the months taken off my life because oh dear lord, going into Walmart for yarn and fabric should not be that exhausting.

1. Create very long-term women’s shelters which operate like small towns. Would include housing, meals, counseling, etc with a primary goal of creating a safe, stable, healing environment for children involved. Partner with businesses to offer employment on location, allowing women to use/learn work skills and to earn and save money. Kevin suggests using closed military bases… they’re already built and are equipped with barracks, large eating halls and kitchens, airports, security, and space ready to rent to telemarketing or manufacturing companies.

2. Install a large white flag on our front lawn, connected to a button that I can press from inside the house. I push the button, flag raises and waves. Twenty minutes later, Pizza Hut shows up with dinner.

So if you are reading this blog and you are rich, please implement one or both of those ideas asap, thx.

As soon as I swallowed it I thought – wait. Did I already do this earlier? Or does it just seem familiar because I’m sleepy and I take a pill just like this every night?

Mouse often gets double phenobarb because of the same question, and yes I do know that they make these things you can buy at the grocery store for like a dollar to help flaky people remember if they took their medicine or not, actually I have several of those things but they only work if you remember to put all your pills for the week in them.

Extra phenobarb doesn’t hurt Mouse. It gets converted to valium, which frankly he could use. But double my Zoloft? Holy hell.

My dreams that night were packed full of details, ideas, schemes to solve everything, fix the world, deal with [family member I promised to try and mention less often here]. There was amazing food, crazy curly highways, art galleries full of incredible pieces that I’m totally going to rip off someday, and this hilarious episode of Trading Spaces where we went in and vandalized/decorated each other’s hotel rooms.

Then yesterday I was quietly, internally manic. Distracted by all of the world’s horrible horribleness and furious at myself for not doing more in every area of life: not pushing myself in my art, holding back my writing because I’m too busy being the good child, not keeping the house clean, not getting stuff done, and then oh my god there are kids in this world who live in fear and filth and how in hell can I sit here and stress about my stupid suburbanite little problems? There are kids in this world who live in FEAR. And filth! And have no safe drinking water or mosquito nets or immunizations or hope for ever living on more than eight dollars a month.

We also went to the fall festival at Nicolaus’ preschool, and it was totally cute.

I made the boys’ costumes and before you get all annoyed because I’m one of those bitches who can draw AND make amazing bento lunches AND sew, let me say right now that I can’t sew worth a crap. When I used my mom’s sewing machine to hem the canvasses for the Ethiopia project, Kevin looked at my crooked, sad stitches and shook his head. “Haven’t those babies been through enough?”

People have tried to teach me, and I have tried to learn. But have you ever SEEN a sewing machine? Holy shit you guys. Wind the bobbin up the ring tension, turn the piston and thread the sock puppet winder needle hootus ass something and don’t do this or it’ll break and don’t do that or everything you sew will come apart at the most embarrassing possible moment and you’ll have good luck for seven years, but it’ll mostly be the ironic kind of good luck that comes back and bites you in the ass.

So I’m quite proud of the costumes.

I’m happy because of the cute costumes and I’m worried about the world. When I get like this I always feel like somehow finding addresses of random poor people and sending them ten dollars in cash. What else can you do with this helpless, frustrated feeling? It’s too much, it’s too overwhelming, and giving to some random charity feels too indirect or inefficient or… I don’t know. I keep feeling like if we just sat down and really thought about the problems, the solutions would be right there.

But I can’t even remember to take library books back or to plan more than 15 minutes ahead for dinner every night or to – I don’t know, not suddenly double my goddamned brain medicine. Does that really sound like the kind of mind that could fix any damn thing about the world?

Kevin says we should make a website just like www.howstuffworks.com except it would be www.howstuffworksaccordingtohilariouslittlekids.com

The domain name is available, we’re pretty sure.

Nicolaus would contribute his theories on dinosaur extinction (lack of warning labels, you may recall, to inform the dinosaurs that smoking is dangerous), and evolution (carnivorous dinosaurs evolved into hawks and eagles. Plant-eating dinosaurs evolved into chickens and nice birds that eat only bread and seeds.), and gender identification of motor vehicles (all cars are female because they have no weiners).

And there’d be a section for inventions. Nicolaus has long been coming up with crazy machines that do something… like turning on the snow, or helping me sort pasta shells… but every now and then he invents something that could really work. I mean besides the poopoo clock.

We were at a friend’s house a few months ago, and her son kept climbing on the stairs no matter how many times she asked him – ever so nicely because she is British and she sounds ever so nice even when she’s being stern – to stop it. Nicolaus stopped his important Endangered Hippo Conservationist work to take a small plastic toy over to her. “Here,” he said, “You need to talk through this.”

“Oh! I see, will it make me louder then?”

“No. It’s just… there’s kind of like a ‘ittle monster in there. And HE will say whatever you say but in a monster voice. So that way he’ll just… get off the stairs.”

Okay, so NO STEALING THAT IDEA. We’re talking to QVC as soon as we find talking monsters small enough to make this work. We found some very small parrots – budgies really – but they don’t have quite the menacing tone Nicolaus is envisioning. I personally find their voices creepy as fuck, and if I heard one of these say “Tiffany, get off the stairs.” I’d not only get off the stairs, but I’d move to a house without stairs and try to use ramps instead of stairs for the rest of my everloving life, but whatever. That’s why I’m not an inventor.

So. Today I was complaining about my floppy stomach. Nicolaus and Graham both adore my squishy gut, because hey! Squishy! But no, I whined, I really need to exercise to make it not so squishy anymore.

Nicolaus brightened, “I’m going to make you a machine that will help your stomach get smaller!”

“Oh yeah?” Dude, you and everyone else with a commercial on late night TV.

He curled his fingers into a ball shape, “It will be like a little ball thing, okay?”

“Kay.”

“And what it does is it follows you and it makes this really scary growling noise at you.”

“Eeek! Why?”

“Because THAT. Will make you run.”

PATENT PENDING, MOTHERFUCKERS. We’re going to be rich.