It’s 6:30 in the morning. I’m awake. There’s a monkey in the bathtub. It’s the same monkey pictured here, only a different kid hugs him now, and runs to get him any time we gather up to leave the house, and takes him to Fudruckers and demands a booster seat for the monkey.

At 8:00 last night I kissed both boys goodnight after a lovely reading of the literary classic Truck Trouble. They both cuddled up with their pillows and blankets. Ah, a successful bedtime.

Ass! Me, I mean. They somehow interpreted, “I love you guys. Goodnight.” to mean, “Feel free to get up and have a big party in here. Until like 11:00.”

For almost three hours, they played Baby College in the dim light. Every so often I’d say, “Go to bed you guys!”

and they’d say something about right after we learn about whales.

And I’d say, “You need to get in your beds.”

And they’d say, “We need to practice learning about sea creatures.”

And then another, almost identical voice would call, “See deechirs!”

They make couch parenting a real challenge sometimes. What? It’s exactly like Attachment Parenting except you see how much you can do without leaving the comfort of your couch.

At some point I heard the rustle-scooting of their plastic step stool being dragged across the bathroom floor. It was Graham, checking to see if everything up on the way top of the bathroom counter is still dangerous for babies and still cool-looking. Nail scissors. Q-tips. Daddy’s Razor. Yep, all awesome.

I got up and herded him back to happy bed. Nicolaus was asleep. Graham would follow soon, definitely. No? Shit. Graham played with blocks for another hour almost. I know I should have gone in there and made a big drama fuss, but you just don’t understand the tiredness.

Around 11 he asked for a sippy cup refill, flopped down on his happy bed, and went to sleep.

The good news is that they got along together for a freakishly long period, without any adult moderator or referee or dual shock collars or anything.

The other good news is that there is now a monkey in the bathtub.

Why don’t they invent a little gauge that shows you how your driving affects your fuel efficiency? I know when I drive like an asshole, my car’s mileage is crappy. When I pay attention and coast whenever possible and take off smoothly from a red light, the mileage is nice and rewarding. It would be cool to have a little gauge giving me visual feedback when I’m doing the right thing (coasting, or using a giant electromagnet on my front bumper so Mack trucks will tug me along behind them) or the wrong thing (sitting in the parking lot of the post office like an idiot with my engine running and my air conditioner blowing because the kids will be too hot if I turn it off) or something in between. Even if the input was approximate, people would like that sort of thing don’t you think? Maybe not. But you prototype it for me, and manufacture and market it and I bet you sell… heck, 50 of them at least.

And! Why don’t we do something to recapture the energy that’s wasted when we hit the brakes? Now here’s where me being an art major is frustrating, because you can’t file a patent for “Some kind of mechanism that takes advantage of physical laws.” but really. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to do compared to how complex and magical the rest of the vehicle is. To me.

Kevin suggested a spring that would coil up, then release when you started going again to help get the car into motion more efficiently. That’s way better than what I was thinking, which was some kind of crazy Rube-Goldberg machine under the axels, which I don’t even know how to spell.

Third car idea: A huge piece of self adhesive contact paper that goes all over the back seat area. Every so often when the crumbs and poor drawings of robots etc get to be too much, simply peel and throw away. Oh it would be even better if it was a little bit sticky on both sides! So trash and junk would collect, making for easy disposal.

While I’m on crazy inventions, I hereby publicly promise to show my boobs to whomever first invents a simple, affordable, easy to install and remove bathtub divider for parents who need to bathe two young children at a time and who have the unfortunate combination of one child who uses bathtime to very seriously work on developing ocean and animal rescue best practices, and another child who believes that splashing environmental activists is what puts the FUN in FUNNY.

And if restaurants would offer a drink top with a little sippy spout? That would be better.

And pizza boxes should be perforated so you can break them down smaller.

And I’m tired. Please invent a thing to fix tiredness asap thanks.

When I woke up this morning, Kevin was gone. He’d been summoned into Graham’s happy bed. Some nights Graham wakes up crying and insists that one of us lay down Dora piddow Dam’s happy bed. It’s so cool that Kevin hears the boys during the night and goes to help them. He used to be the sounder sleeper, so night duty has always been my thing. But these early mornings are kicking my butt, and my body is making up for lost rest by pushing me into a deeper, deafer kind of sleep at night. I’m willing to lay down with Dora, even though that’s illegal in Georgia, but I’m even more willing to celebrate Kevin’s willingness to do it.

I slid quietly into the bathroom where I hoped to quietly pee and quietly brush my teeth. I flushed. There was a little squeal from the boys’ room. Damn.

Which isn’t that I don’t treasure each beautiful moment that I spend with my children. It’s just that I was hoping to eat a donut before they woke up and saw and wanted donuts too. We started yesterday off with donuts. We must never do any of the things we did yesterday, in case it was the thing that turned our groovy, fourish son into The Littlest Insurgent.

“Is it still the middle of the night, Mama?” a little raspy mouse voice called. He was trying to whisper. Four year olds are shit at whispering.

I leaned into his doorway. Their room is like a cave. Except instead of stalactites there are large wooden beams and fire sprinklers, and instead of stalagmites and sode straws there are pictures of astronauts, and instead of bat guano there are legos and little metal cars. Jeesh, you are so literal. What I mean is, very little natural light reaches their room. And in that sense it is like a — oh nevermind. It was 8:30 in the morning, and he was awake and worried that he had some sort of insomnia.

I waved for him to get up.

He didn’t climb down from his loft bed/nature preserve right away. It takes a few minutes for him to gather up all of his animals and things. There’s a tiny bird from the floral section of Michael’s, whose beak we drew on with a marker. There’s the poison tree frogs, rubber lizards, and the it thing for the week — a plastic turtlle named CrashBud. Bud because of flowers, so people will know she’s a girl. And Crash so people will think she’s really tough.

A few minutes later he appeared behind me in my room, where I was working on organizing our walk-in closet. He dumped the animals across my bed, and bounced and talked cheerfully about how poisonous everything was.

I’m too tired to finish telling you about today. But do you see? That was the tone for the entire day. No hating us and all of our actions. No screaming. I’m so relieved that we will be able to keep him afterall.

There are people out in the courtyard playing guitar and singing. They have a bongo drum, and some candles. It’s like I’m a cooler person just for being in earshot.

The days this week have all been long and loud. Most of today was Nicolaus. Nicolaus crying, Nicolaus grabbing, Nicolaus throwing a fit. He was a scout on the brink. A naturalist on the edge. A total punk.

Something’s up with him, I don’t know. He hasn’t acted like this in a long time. Theories include:

• he is jealous of Kevin and I having conversations together on the weekends
• a sinus infection and/or allergies and/or tiny angry robots sneaked up through his nose into his brain and once there toggled frontal lobe neurons to asshole mode
• allergic reaction to the donut I gave him this morning
• on some level suddenly realizes that the whole santa thing is bullshit
• hates us for taking him to the dentist this week, rightfully so
• the possibility that THIS TIME a massive tantrum will produce different results is just too exciting to resist
• not pleased with the way the 2008 elections are shaping up
• at the age of four and a half, he has outgrown the need for parents and our quaint attempts at guidance are really annoying.

To his credit he phrases his rage with care. You can tell he wants to say that he hates us because we’re mean motherfucking Nazis, but he won’t. “YOU are just making me so so so frustrated and upset. And if you knew how sad I felt you wouldn’t be doing any of this. Because YOU are making me cry and cry and it’s really obnoxious the way you keep on telling me things that you know will really upset me. And I HATE what you are doing right now. I DO NOT LIKE the way you guys are acting lately!!!”

We put him to bed three hours before the sun went down.

But then damn him, he punctuates awful days with 169 pounds of cute. He puts everything into random units of measurement like that. He’ll say, “When you see this seashell, you will be amazed for 171 days!” or “It’s like 143 pounds of good. That’s how good strawberries with raw sugar tastes.”

When he isn’t busy expressing his outrage over flashlights or styrafoam or books about Amphibians Commonly Found in North America Not Counting Mexico, he is painfully cool. He’s in talking overdrive. Which I know, whatever, he was born chatting about the time this bird was splashing in a puddle and he got mud all over his beak and then the other birds all thought he was a different kind of bird and ohhh get it? Naturalist jokes are so funny. But you don’t understand. The talking goes to eleven… thousand. So all this week we’ve gotten to hear all of his wonderful strange ideas and nonsequitor thoughts. A few of which weren’t about how his parents are horrible and mean for making him stop his important animal preserve work to get in here and flush this toilet.

Like, he was talking about tree frogs, when he stopped. “Do the cashiers — are they the ones who decide how much each thing costs?”

Or “Hey! That’s funny! Numbers start with letters. Like Ssssssix. And F-FFFffffour. That’s funny!”

Or “It’s funny how in movies, everything is flat. Even though really, it’s not flat. But in the movie, everything just looks really… really flat. But really it’s not flat. It’s a picture of the real things which are. Which are puffed up.”

Or “I’m kind of like addicted to pottery. It’s not really good because I’m so obsessed that I don’t want to do anything else. Just sit here all day! And work on pottery! You should be worried, Mama. I am basically? Getting? Totally addicted.”

Or “Oops! My body forgot to turn me back into a boy. So the whole time we were at the store I was actually a you know what? Lobster.”

How do you strangle a kid like that? You can’t. So is it a deliberate survival technique, designed to manipulate us into not sending him to live with the singing hippies in the courtyard? Or just dumb luck that we find lobster pottery boy so fun to hang out with?

What I need are extra days, ones that are squeezed in between bedtime and daylight, ones that don’t count toward the passing of time or the getting older of boys or the entropic house mess. Like those calories you can eat in the kitchen while cleaning up the dinner dishes, only I need entire Thanksgiving dinner’s worth of them. In time form.

Graham is sick, maybe. I don’t know – and usually my intuition is pretty good on these matters. I study him, I hold him. My intuition tells me that I don’t know. Is it teething? An ear infection? Frustration over the war in Iraq? No, I think he’s sick but it’s nothing clearcut. No rash, no runny nose, no red throat. His symptoms are:
1. Fever.
2. Sadness.
3. Wanting to be in the buckle chair.
4. Asking to get out of the buckle chair.
5. NO OUT! Dam stay in buckle CHAIR.

He also has some difficulty walking, slurring of speech and apparent mental confusion, but that’s all normal for a 20 month old.

Tonight Nicolaus went off into an alternate dimension where all energy and mass is converted to screaming. So I think he might be sick too. Or a belligerent asshole. Hard to say. There was so much more but wow. I’m so tired it hurts.

So here is a photo I took in Dahlonega a couple of weeks ago.

Ooh and here’s one from our trip to Greenville, SC:

And one from… um, my messy apartment.

Why am I still awake?? Those weird people are going to make me get out of bed at six in the morning and they’re going to have all kinds of crazy demands. My bosses I mean, not my kids. My kids sleep in until 8.