Not that I’ve ever been one to shy away from sharing when it comes to this sort of thing, but you are almost definitely very grateful that I haven’t updated you on how our week is going.

My mom used to always say that she wanted our birthdays to be memorable. So every year, she would buy a houseful of balloons and do a cake and make tacos or whatever we wanted. And every year, my dad would offer to shoot the dog.
“What?” he’d say, “They would always remember… ah yes, my seventh birthday! I’ll never forget it. That was the year dad shot my dog.”

So if memorable is the measure of a successfull birthday, then I think we did pretty well.

The lucky thing is that Graham waited until after we…
drove down to Glen Rose
and scoped out the beautiful lodge at the animal preserve
and pretended to know how to play chess on a wooden board with little hand-carved animal-shaped pieces
and went to a restaurant with animal heads all over the wall, which amused Nicolaus the Naturalist because he doesn’t know yet where animal heads come from
and which made Graham shout out “Bouse! BOUSE.” because our dog really does look very much like a deer
and ate some of the best chicken fried steak in existance
and came back to our room
and lit a fire in the fireplace
and cuddled in bed watching our latest Netflix, Frontier House
and listened to the wolves howl in the distance
and slept
and woke up early
and said “Happy Birthday Nicolaus!”
and Nicolaus told me in a sleepy voice all of the bigger kiddish things he could do now, like help me chop onions and load the dishwasher and do laundry like I ever do any of those things, but it was very sweet
and went down to the pavillion overlooking a beautiful landscape, where they serve breakfast
and ate
and visited a little with some of the campers, who were all very impressed by our son’s obvious fourness
and saw wild turkeys which are huge and hideous
and drove halfway through the wildlife preserve
and fed llamas and zebras and antelopes and very rare exotic “white-tailed” deer
to the delight of The Naturalist
Who is four, I hope you know
and stopped at the little petting zoo to pet the goats and things
(part of Kevin’s plot to convince the children to outvote me on his housegoat idea)
and bought a pair of binoculars for the naturalist
but were still an hour’s drive to the end of the wildlife preserve thingy
to start throwing up.

And I waited until we were back in Dallas, at my parents’ house for balloons and cake and singing and presents and magical birthday hugs all before I started my own throwing up.

The CAR waited until we were about to drive home for the night. To start throwing up.

So Graham and I have spent the day gradually recovering from a night that I can honestly say, was grody to the maximum amount of grody acheivable with only two family members participating. Kevin has spent the day taking the minivan back to the dealer and researching what kind of car we will be buying soon (hint: not a dodge). Nicolaus says the naturalist’s birthday was Great! and has spent today looking at all of us through binoculars.

Happy fourth birthday, Scout. We love you to the end of this earth. I hope your fifth birthday is boring as shit.

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.

Today at 7:45 AM, my boobs did something useful for probably the last time. I say probably because you never know what might happen in the future, or how you might change your definition of useful. Barring any plane crashes in the ocean where we run short of flotation devices my days as a fully-functioning mammal are officially done.

In a way it is sad. Those were nice, quiet, cuddly moments sometimes… you know, whenever Nicolaus wasn’t climbing to the top of my head and singing the why-do-you-always-have-to-feed-that-stupid-baby song, or the phone wasn’t ringing just out of my reach, or the dog wasn’t choosing that exact moment to have an extra-fancy seizure or something. But really, they were mostly nice, quiet, cuddly moments.

But in another, more accurate way it isn’t sad at all. It marks the dawn of a magical new era: one where my children sleep. Like at night.

Last night — and those of you with babies who have slept through the night since before they were born because of your amazing skills at being better than me in almost every possible way and that isn’t sarcasm, seriously YOU KICK my mothering butt, can be extra smug when they read what I’m about to say — Graham slept all night long.

Did you hear me, motherfuckers? All night.

Without waking up for me to pat him back to sleep.

Without waking up to consume anything.

No screaming. No crying.

And all of this astounding nothing took place in his own bed. Without another human touching him.

He woke up at 7 in a glorious mood. We took a shower. As I was getting out of the shower, he looked up. “Boo-bie! Boobeeee”

Like hey! You said they were all gone… what the hell sick game is this?

I quickly grabbed my bra.

He looked disappointed. Then he shrugged his hands up, making his little sign for where’d it go? “Boobie?”

So I went ahead and let him nurse one last time, like a big stupid annoying sappy breastfeeding dork. It was peaceful and wonderful. Almost as peaceful and wonderful as sleeping all night long is going to be tonight.

I’m joking of course. The sleeping will be WAY more peaceful and wonderful.

Kevin went to the store for me the other night because we were all out of food and it was night and he is nice. So when I got up the next morning I was happy to see food.
But! Does it make me a sad nerd that I was mostly excited that he (unintentionally, I think) put the produce on the counter in rainbow order? AS ALL THINGS SHOULD BE?

I have written a bunch of scattered little partial posts this week but haven’t had the energy to click the Publish button. It’s way down at the bottom of the screen, and I’m pretty out of shape and my baby is punishing me for weaning him by waking up at 5:30 in the oh my god morning because those multiple night feedings were filling that tummy of his and he wants FOOD.

And at night Nicolaus takes forever to fall asleep, and I can’t type with him awake because he wants to know what I’m doing and why do you have to do this boring work Mama? And is it very important work? And then I have to confess that no, it isn’t that important. Then he asks Then why are you doing it?

I don’t have the energy (see: Graham, meanness of) so I can’t think of an answer to that. So I close the laptop and wait for him to fall asleep. Yeah, in my bed because Kevin’s working late this week and I can’t think of an answer to the question of why can’t I just fall asleep in your bed?

But before he falls asleep he has to talk. And ask many questions.

What does “no fair” mean?
What are billboards for?
How do hats keep the sun out of people’s eyes?
Why do people think tigers might disappear?
Why do some people like to hunt animals?
What would happen if a grownup killed all of the police in their whole town? Who would be left to put him in jail?
What would happen if a person blew up their whole government?
And SO ON?

Crap. Now I’m going to be on some sort of watch list aren’t I? I would like the record to show that my son isn’t asking these questions because he wishes to do these things. He’s just asking about the succession of power. I swear. It’s come up before, and we go all the way down the line with me making up half of it until we get to like that guy at Subway in charge of making sure there are enough mustard packets in the little dispenser thing being president. It’s legal to wonder these things in that context, right?