electric boogaloo

The scout started throwing up Wednesday night, and is now resting quietly in his bed. His main symptoms are fever, upset stomach, needing a drink, not gatorade, wanting to eat, but not toast because that made him throw up yesterday, and not soup or crackers or really anything else, and needing to watch the Cars movie, and needing to wear jeans and then needing to wear sweatpants which are in the car but he can’t wait he really needs to wear his comfortabler pants like RIGHT NOW, and then oh! Wait! Needing to wear his overalls because what he really wants is more pockets. RIGHT NOW.

He’s alternating between being outrageously sweet and adorable, and being a complete asshole. My dad used to say about some people, “That’s impressive. Complete assholes are really rare.”

The house is messy, despite terrific efforts to make new habits for a cleaner house. I had it looking almost decent yesterday afternoon. But then we cut up a lot of paper into little triangles and let the baby have playdoh because when you’ve been up since six and your other kid is sick and pathetic, any activity that might make the baby happy for a few minutes where you don’t have to stand or think or anything sounds like a terrific idea. And once you have that kind of mess scattered around, the rest of the house kind of goes oh good! I was so tired of having to suck my gut in. Foom — mess, everywhere.

Poor Nicolaus. He hates throwing up. I know everyone hates it, but he hates it more. It sucks seeing him sick.

Lately he says that he is a naturalist. It came from the Webelos handbook. I gave him a suede-covered sketchbook that ties up and has little pockets for his colored pencils. He carries it around so the Naturalist can draw things that are insterding to him. “Like if I see a little animal sitting on a beautiful leaf? And I want to remember that leaf later because it’s so beautiful? I don’t have to kill that animal so I can bring the leaf home because…” (great flourish, produces journal) “I have this special book that naturalists use. I just draw a picture of that leaf. So the little animal doesn’t have to get killed or anything.”

Taxidermists, watch your ass. This naturalist journal idea could put you out of business.

Nicolaus talks increasingly like a cross between Jeff Goldblum and Owen Wilson. It’s sort of a science-geek, valley california environmentalist groove thing. He narrates everything he does or thinks, and for a long time I’ve been wanting to figure out a way to record him without him noticing and switching over to the spinning drunken spit noise squeaky singing thing that most kids do when you pull out a video camera.

So the other day we went to that horrible walmart place and bought an old-timey tape recorder. I have this annoying habit of avoiding technology gadgetty things - like those new “cellular” phones - but somehow anything manufactured before 1985 doesn’t bother me at all.

It’s like how I resist the modern educational cartoon characters, partly because they annoy me and partly because under the message of wonderful sharing and caring, they all have another message:you want buy all of the related toys and books and CDs and DVDs and cereal and shoelaces and frozen waffles and etc. Thomas the Train Toothpaste! Dora the Explorer Underwear! Wizzy the Wizzawazzit Water Weinie!

But episodes of the Smurfs and Carebears? Crucial cultural touchstones not to be missed. What’s the difference? I don’t fucking know.

Similarly, Elmo should die in a fire along with whoever is responsible for that “Journey to Ernie” crap. But why does that grate on my nerves so much, and yet it is important to me that my kids repeatedly watch this totally inane clip of two vaguely heterosexual friends looking at some goldfish? Again, I don’t know.

Anyway, we bought a clunky black little tape recorder. It came with a microphone, which is perfect — Nicolaus loves microphones and walks around pretending to talk into a college science teacher. Don’t ask me where he gets this stuff. I mean, the pretending all the time he got from me, but I pretended normal things like being a dog with red fur who had invisible Jewish friends that rode in giant helicopters with twenty potties. Being a scoutish naturalist/science professor? That’s just plain odd.

I was really looking forward to capturing his awesome weirdness on tape to play for him someday and show him see? See how hilarious and cool you were when you were four?

But so far I haven’t recorded anything awesome at all. He likes to wear headphones while he records and he thinks his voice sounds super cool in the microphone, so I now have an hour long tape of him breathing and squealing and spitting into the speaker. Which it just occured to me that when he grows up he’ll be a man. He will totally listen to the tape full of gross fart noises and breathing and go “Wow! I was hilarious and cool when I was four.”