electric boogaloo

It’s too early to move or think or talk.

Me and Graham are sitting on the couch. I’m a good mother who feeds her children something almost every single morning, so he’s enjoying a bag of those Quakes rice snacks. He calls them da-ters. Dutch for crackers.

He holds one up and says “doooo”, then lowers it and raises the other hand “dreeee” – back and forth, up and down, two-three-two-three. Even though he doesn’t have three in his hands, he only has two. God babies are dumb.

Ha, I just remembered when Graham was five or six months old Nicolaus introduced him to someone. “That’s my baby brother. He doesn’t know very much.”

And it’s true! He knows jack! Like if his toes disappear, he freaks. Kevin wants to make him some socks that have little clear plastic windows over the toes so he can see that your toes are fine. Honestly, they are right fucking there.

He digs in the bag of crackers and pulls one out. Munch, munch. He hums while he eats. Then he goes to put the half-eaten ones back in the bag and he laughs and looks at his mother because he knows that drives me insane. It’s several steps beyond double-dipping on the Geller-Castanza Rudeness Scale. I dare you to go to a party and half eat a bunch of chips and then casually sweep them off of your plate back into the big bowl. And then serve yourself some more whole ones.

Graham thinks it’s funny for me to say no.

“No, no don’t put those back in.”

“Nawwww-naow.” He laughs. HOW is that funny?

Then he offers me a cracker. I pretend to eat it because have you tried those things? They’re like communion wafers without the joyful replenishing wonderfulness of knowing that you have just performed a holy sacrament and now your mom won’t hassle you about church for several months. They taste like stale dog bread.

I say thank you and I make smack-mmm pretend eating noises, and then I tuck the rice cracker under my leg where he can’t see it.

But he’s onto me, I think, because he dropped his next offering straight down my shirt. “Day-doooo” he prompted me to thank him for being so generous. “Day-too”

So now my shirt is full of rice crackers. Some of them have been partially chewed I think. Gross. But he slept through the night in his very own bed again last night, so he is allowed to be gross.

And now he has climbed down, fished my missing lipstick out from under the couch, and is trying to put makeup on Mouse, who is surprisingly happy to participate in the lipstick being put on. Either he thinks it is food, or he thinks it’s a fetching shade. Graham laughs.

I really should get up and start the day. We have to go return the rental minivan and pick up our own minivan – which is the same kind of minivan that we rented, taking almost all of the fun out of having your minivan in the shop for transmission work and needing a rental minivan and aren’t you glad I didn’t bore you with the suburbanite drama of the week?

Then we’re going to drive an hour or two to go spend the night at a wildlife preserve, and in the morning Nicolaus when we wake up! Nicolaus! Will be four! It turned out that he mainly wanted to climb a mountain to see wild animals up close, so we came up with this brilliant idea that doesn’t involve exercise or getting out in the cold and stuff. We left it up to him, but were totally relieved when he picked animal preserve over mountain climbing. He went to bed crazy excited, and didn’t fall asleep until late because what if a giraffe wants to walk where we need to drive? What if a real mountain lion tries to eat the nice animals? And so on!

There will be all kinds of fun pictures when we get back. Assuming I don’t leave him with the antelopes because he just woke up and is being a total grump. In ten minutes he has thrown himself on the floor three times and blamed Graham because “Gray-AM! You just started like a – a fightment! And encouraged me to fall down!” followed by his ultimate insult, where he says darkly: “And that wasn’t a very Scoutish thing to do.”

But I’m sure he’ll get in a better mood once he is strapped into a carseat for several hours, two inches from his brother whose hobby is hassling people and laughing.