I want to make a commercial for Build A Bear Workshop.

Opening shot of a cheerful lady saying, “Welcome to the Build-a-Bear!”

Then a quick medley of shots showing how it works. Pick a bear! Stuff it! Sew it! Pick accessories! Name it! Take it home!

Interior, minivan: Two children pull the Built Bear ™ back and forth between them.

Interior, living room: Two children fight and scream over the cool house-shaped box. One child grabs a baseball bat, takes aim for him older brother’s head. Focus shift briefly to the bear, laying face up on the floor in the background.

Cut to a nice suburban kitchen. Two children are on the floor howling in near unison: I need it I neeeeed it I neeeed it I NEED IT YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW SAD I AM RIGHT NOW

Focus shift to the bear, the box, and all accessories on top of the refridgerator. MOM stands in front of the refridgerator with her arms crossed and shakes her head.

BOYS: (Sobbing, they are talking over each other and it’s not possible to tell which brother is saying what) I NEED IT I NEED IT IT’S HIS FAULT HE WAS THE ONE FIGHTING WELL HE TRIED TO BEAT ME UP I NEED IT GIVE IT BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK

Logo:

Some people spank their kids. Some people use time out. Some people threaten to take away dessert, or toys, or to send their kids to inferior state colleges if they don’t do what they are told.

But you have to do what works for your child, and for Graham there is really only one thing that works:

“Graham. Do you want me to take your shoes off?”

Logistical update:

It’s 4:40 in the morning. I am in my parents’ bed. My parents are in the guest room. They have this massive bed and a stereo and a master bathroom in here, so it made sense for me to take it away from them during my visit. I’m waking up specifically to update because during the day it seems impossible to write anything. Dallas is just too exciting! We can’t just sit around the house. They have a Target here for goodness sake.

We all flew to Dallas last weekend for my uncle’s wedding. The family wedding! OF THE CENTURY.

Kevin’s back in Atlanta without us. Crying about the silence in the house, I’m sure.

The boys and I all have a cold, it’s the middle of the night and that Enya music is a little too loud. Must adjust volume. Much better. Nicolaus is to my left, sleeping restlesly because there were a few things he forgot to accuse me of before he fell asleep. So he kicks the blanket off and mumbles “Why did you take away my blanket? And HEY! I had a different pillow.”
It isn’t right to kick your kid off the bed and pretend it was an accident. Every good mother knows that… it’s in all the parenting magazines.

On my right is Graham. He was pressed against my shoulder earlier in the night, but Graham has never one to be imprisoned by society’s socially constructed limits of normal sleep positions. He’s now turned sideways, somewhere down by my ankles. A minute ago he almost dove off the bed, but I blocked him with my leg. I’m sick, but I’m still quick enough to save my child from certain rolling off the bedness.

Nicolaus just turned himself 90 degrees and pressed his head against my arm. “I’m stuck here,” he said. I hope someday he resigns himself to how awful his life is.

The wedding was a total success. I was going to describe the wedding (lovely, with a great preacher and a lot of love in the room…) but it’s late and I’m wiped out. So you get some quick statistics on how it all went down, with maybe more details later.

The day before the wedding:

800 miles: distance from Atlanta to Dallas

1.7 hours: duration of the flight

1.3 hours: duration of the security line at hartsfield airport

# of shoes we put on Graham before going to the airport because he freaks out if you make him take his shoes off for our nation’s security or whatever: 0

# of times someone commented on Nicolaus’ captain uniform: 12

# of times he complained that people were making fun of him for dressing like a pilot: 2

5 minutes: Time between Graham falling asleep and us having to wake him up to get off the plane.

3 hours: Time between our flight arriving and the wedding rehearsal.

4 hours: Time between our flight arriving and Graham falling totally asleep.

# of incidents of family drama — 2, including 0 directly involving me, 0 involving my grandmother. 1 involving my brother having dreads and my mom freaking out a little, the other involving… well, the thing that people always forget about weddings which is that no matter how right you feel about the situation, this weekend is just not about you or your rightness. Because every family wedding is only about one simple, beautiful goal: Getting my grandmother and her boyfriend drunk enough to dance their conservative asses off so we can take pictures. Everything else is incidental, and my brothers always seem to lose focus right before a major event.

# of super cool cousins I got to see at the rehearsal dinner that I almost never see: 3

# of cousins present that I almost never see: ??? (3 + unknown figure)

The bride’s family wore to the rehearsal dinner: Clothes

The groom wore: a black rolling stone t-shirt and gold cowboy boots, plus a jacket.

The groom’s brother wore: a nice shirt, a pink jacket, and red hightop sneakers

The groom’s neice wore: Glasses instead of contacts because she left her contacts in Atlanta like RIGHT THERE on the bathroom counter like an idiot

The wedding:
1 little boy in a tuxedo, who on the drive to the wedding was reciting the steps he was going to take in order to bear the rings.

4 groomsmen

Number of pictures the photographer took before the wedding with a big bright flash that freaked Nicolaus out: 4,217

Number of barking churchy wedding coordinators whose icy hearts were unmelted by the sight of a cute kid in a tux with tails: 1

Number of times Nicolaus needed to pee before the wedding: 1

Number of available bathrooms in the men’s dressing area: 0

Number of men in tuxedos who surrounded Nicolaus in case someone came in while he was peeing in the water fountain: 4

Men in tuxedos who tried to distract me so I wouldn’t realize what was going on: 1

Men who afterwards admitted that they had done the same thing at some point in their lives: 3

Number of minutes into the ceremony before Nicolaus was overwhelmed and ready to sit down: 4

Minutes before he found me and Kevin and sat down: 10

Cuteness factor of him realizing it was over and jumping up and running back up the steps, past my dad and my uncle, and back down the steps to grab the flower girl’s hand so they could go back down the aisle together: 12

Minutes of the ceremony that Graham didn’t snore through: 0

The reception:
People who wanted to hold Graham: 200

People who were able to hold Graham without him destroying them verbally: 1.5

Nicolaus ate: 4 bites of steamed vegetables. 1 dinner roll. 1 pieces of cake.

Graham’s dinner: 1 dinner roll, broken into 3 pieces, used as a bread puzzle which he did not eat.

Hours before my brother and his girlfriend ended up in the pool with Nicolaus: 2

Number of times I danced: 1.5

Number of minutes I was able to move without holding Graham: 4

Times I hugged the bride and the groom: 5 and 3

Overall wedding success factor: 15

Number of times I am ever drinking from a water fountain again: 0

Shopping for dresses with two little angry people in a tiny dressing room is bad. Don’t ever do it. If it comes down to that or buying something off the rack randomly, please do that instead. Really, I mean it. Because no matter how cute the dress is that you end up choosing, you’ll look so exhausted when you wear it to the event that the cuteness will be negated.

To be fair, Nicolaus actually wasn’t an angry person. He was kind of the opposite of angry. He was more like giddy. Or high.

We made a deal on the drive to the mall: as long as he was being really really good and sweet and easy going during this boring awful mall trip, I would answer every natural science question he could think of. He was floored by the awesomeness of this offer. After a quiet minute he said, “Mama? Right now I have this feeling like you? Are the most wonderful person in the whole world.” He sounded as surprised as I was.

“Wow! I am the most wonderful person in the world?”

“Well, I mean I just feel like that right now,” Haha mom, don’t let it go to your head.

Our deal worked beautifully. I dragged him all over the mall and he pelted me with one question after another, which I mostly was able to answer. During all those years in school when I was ignoring math and health and government and diagramming sentences, I was reading books about animals and stuff. So now I can’t balance my checkbook or remember what kidneys are for or whatever but by golly, I can answer a four year old’s life science questions.

So by the time we were in the dressing room at Macy’s, we’d been at the mall for an hour and a half and he still wasn’t angry at all. In fact he was delighted to wander through the dress racks and touch all the dresses (”Stop touching the dresses!” — “I’m just pretending I’m in a forest and these are like the plants and I’m woaaahhh! Getting all tangled up! Help!” — STOP TOUCHING THE OMG DRESSES). He was having a lot of fun while I pushed the umbrella stroller and picked up the toys Graham kept throwing down and dodged in and out of dresses, keeping them all out of the baby’s reach and yet somehow within MY reach which isn’t easy I hope you know. Especially once you have an armload of heavy dresses draped over one arm because sales people nowadays? Are able to make more on their underground gambling operation, where they make security-cam bets on whether I’ll drop everything before I make it to the dressing room, than they make on commissions.

We stuffed ourselves and all the dresses into a dressing room. Nicolaus was delighted to be in the dressing room. Because in the dressing room there are like these cool mirrors that fold out and it’s cool! Because all his friends are in there and oh gosh Mama I’ve been invited to a party and I have to go now!

He folded himself up in the hinged 3-way mirrors, which was cute and everything except that I couldn’t see what I was trying on like, at all. Every time I asked/told/demanded/threatened turtle confiscation for him to PLEASE oh my GOD open the mirror so I could see the dress and either decide it looked awful or decide it looked perfect but cost way too much, he wanted to discuss it. “But why can’t I just stay in here with the mirrors closed? Can’t you use this instead?” He pointed to the 1/2″ strip of brushed metal edging around the side of the mirrors.

“No. I can’t use that.”

“Why not? It’s pretty shiny…”

“Just. Open. The. Mirror.”

“I can just like peek out and tell you if that dress looks good or not?”

“Nicolaus. OPEN IT.”

“Okay, well what if we like take turns? Like I can use it all to myself for a few minutes, then you can use it for the next few minutes, then it will be my turn again. How about that? And it’s my turn first because I’m already wrapped up in here with all my friends, and they kind of like want me to stay.”

This happened over and over and over and over. So there were two angry people in the dressing room, but Nicolaus wasn’t one of them.

So: Dress shopping, two little kids, never do it. I don’t even know how long it took — four hours? fifteen minutes? But time passed, and I managed to catch enough quick mirror glimpses of myself to choose a nice dress. Then we still had to go down to the children’s section and find something nice for Graham to wear. I gathered everything up and found the elevator and went down and ding! the doors opened and there was a big sign advertising free fucking childcare for while you shop.

There are a thousand words in me about this kid I hang out with all day, this kid who has a 3-part plan to save tigers from extinction even though he doesn’t like tigers because they’re carnivores. This kid who describes to me the physical filing system that is in his brain and how the envelopes he keeps things in are all red, because of the blood they got all over them… you know, because blood goes to the brain and… gross. Anyway. I have this big post about him rolling around but today was so big and so long and so exhausting I just don’t think I can do it.

One quick aside: We decided to give Maria Montessori the finger. We just waved it in the direction of Italy actually, and my sense of direction isn’t great so you know. But yeah. Screw giving my kid a sticker for staying silent throughout lunchtime. If you don’t want to hear about the tool he designed that helps you save animals who are stranded inside a hurricane or tornado, then that’s your loss. Financially, I mean, because we aren’t sending our kid to your school anymore.

I did this crazy thing which, like most crazy things, was suggested by my friend from Oklahoma. If you don’t have any friends from Oklahoma, man — you might think you have done some crazy shit at the suggestion of a friend but no, you haven’t.

I don’t know what any of that means. I just say words, they don’t really mean anything.

So at her insane suggestion, I signed Nicolaus up for a giant buffet of individual classes — basically, we cobbled together a preschool experience for him. Over the next three months, he’ll take gymnastics, drawing, clay working, painting, and music classes – plus weekly visits to a local nature preserve. It sounds ridiculous typing it all out! It sounds like we’re those crazy hothouse parents who make their kid do everything… but really it will come out to fewer hours per week than preschool. He’ll get to socialize. And if you ever want to see Nicolaus very, very happy and focused all you have to do is start teaching him something. It’s less money. It’s no more driving than we were doing. So, hothouse shmothouse. It’s worth a shot anyway… and if we hate this approach, we can look for another preschool in the spring.

That was supposed to be a quick aside, just to update you on the preschool situation. I just had a bad feeling that we were headed for picketing if we stayed with this school. Nicolaus would have made the signs himself this time. They were probably going to have pictures of mean teachers and kids who had no mouths. And probably some sea turtles, just because hey look! I can draw a sea turtle!

And now I’m too tired to get back to why I titled this post with fear and loathing. I was going to write all about what it’s like to spend 5 hours at the mall shopping for a dress to wear to a wedding when you have two energetic and often vengeful little people with you, but now I’m almost really asleep so sorry it was all really funny but I’ll just have to summarize: It’s bad. Very bad.

More later, gators… in the mean time check out my Dad’s shiny new 1 gud blag!