We’re not having his party until my parents can come in a couple of weeks… but still. Ha-hey! Graham is two two two. Incredible how time pushes on like it does. People always say “Woah! It went so fast!” or “Man, it seems incredible that’s it’s only been two years.” but really, it seems like about two years. I’m so sad that the pictures from those early months are missing, I’d love to link back to one of those sleepy little shar-pei alien photos. Here, how about this one from the hospital?

(there’s animation because I’m a dork. Refresh your browser if you missed it.)

I was trying to explain to someone about Graham the other day. With Nicolaus, it’s like I’m home. We share whole chunks of brain matter, and even though home can be messy sometimes, it’s so warm and familiar that I can find my way around in the dark.

With Graham, it’s not like that. I’m on unfamiliar ground with him, like I’m visiting a beautiful beach somewhere and I never know what we’re going to see or hear, or find under the sand. It’s exhausting in a way, and sometimes I have no idea what I’m doing but oh my god – the water is clear and perfect, and there’s a nice breeze. It’s incredible here.

He’s very excited about having a birthday party. Birthday party to him means: An invitation. Followed by people singing. Followed by cake.

Happy birthday, little robot. We love you like crazy.

There, alright? He’s CUTE IN A TUX at a wedding and I posted it. Are you happy??

Okay dang, he IS cute in it.

It’s been a roller coaster couple of weeks in Nicolausland. Some days we cannot believe how lucky we are to have this amazing kid in our lives. He thinks about things that most adults don’t ever stop to think about, and he cares deeply deeply about his ideals and principles and plastic turtles. And Pegasus. Can’t forget that.

Then there are days where he’s crazy and spinning and arguing and generally acting like a four year old, and I feel tempted to yell what my dad used to say when we were little and we were running in the house and arguing and being scared of the toaster and singing songs about diarrhea and etc: Would you PLEASE ACT MY AGE. Those days are exhausting, but we make it through and then go to bed with our ears ringing from the shock of the quiet that suddenly surrounds us – otherwise we’re fine. Just tired.

Then there are days where he is a miserable creature. On those days, everything makes him sad or hurts his feelings, and we don’t know what to say or do and we just feel like we suck, like there’s something he desperately needs that we aren’t giving him and we don’t know what it is.

Then all at once, he springs back and spreads his arms and announces that he is a trumpeter swan and off we go, back into wild, unreasonable coolness.

Oh swans! That reminds me, he is fed up with waiting until he is old enough to join Boy Scouts. He wants to start his own organization for littler kids. It’s called the Naturalist Scouts of (whatever word pops into his head at that moment: Georgia, America, Rainforest, Meriotic Trench…). To join you have to be interested in nature and care about animals. If you shoot an animal or get old enough to use an axe to chop down trees, you get fired. The logo is going to be a picture of a swan, and the colors are red and silver. And everyone has to wear naturey pants (?), and a vest with no shirt on underneath. It can be any sort of vest they want to wear, just something to iron all the patches onto. Oh yes, of course there are patches. To earn patches, you have to make stuff and take care of animals, and alert the police if you see anyone poaching. You can pick up litter, try to eat less meat, and if you ever meet a bear you can do your best to not shoot it. All meetings are to be held outdoors, because meeting at people’s houses isn’t naturey enough. That’s all I have so far, but don’t worry. I’m sure more details are forthcoming.

Today we sort of lurched up and down the spectrum, like a… a what. A wobbly train that isn’t designed for this track, but it sort of fits and mostly stays on and only a few people die whenever it derails.

A minute ago I went in to check on him. His eyes were closed, and he was totally still – which meant he had to be asleep. I pulled the fuzzy lava blanket up around him and said, “I love you. You’re a great person.”

He didn’t turn to face me. He just quietly said, “Sorry I yelled at you earlier.”

“Cool.” I told him, “Sorry I frustrated you so much.” He nodded. He smiled a small smile. And the day was done.

My uncle got married. The ceremony was lovely, with all of the traditional cuteness of the ring bearers and all…

So the ceremony was beautiful. Afterwards we started thinking that some of these traditions are completely bizarre if you really think about them too much. It’s like hearing a word too many times in a row — hey, that’s really funny! But maybe it isn’t really funny. But really. The precession, and the whole thing of having a cute kid pretend to bear the rings, but the rings are fake because you know. Rings. And the tradition of not seeing the bride, and of having bride’s maids and a unity candle, and having somebody pee in the drinking fountain. These are the things that all go into nearly every wedding. For all of the thousands of hours that go into planning the wedding, when you really get down to it you’re mainly picking from a very narrow few options. Would you like A or B? Or a slightly different version of A, that’s really the same actually. Or… A. In a slightly more subdued hue? It’s up to you! Because that’s how you make it your own!

So my brother and his special ladyfriend and I came up with some nice alternatives to the standard wedding traditions. For future brides who came here via google, you’re very welcome!

1. We had thoughts on the whole “Does anyone here know a reason why this couple should not be married…” thing. We think it would be better to go around the room and have each person take an oath swearing that they believe the couple should be married. In marketing, we call this an opt-in approach. For couples who wish to have more elaborate ceremonies, they could have each person list at least one excellent reason that these two people are right for each other and should get married.

2. My brother thought that another way of showing support and solidarity for the couple’s success in marriage would be to insist that each person pay $100 cash to get into the church. Didn’t bring cash? No problem. There is an ATM down the street.

3. In general, he had a lot of thoughts about how to invite people and making sure only the truly serious and supportive ones showed up to the ceremony… we talked about making the directions to the ceremony enormously complex, required multiple-step language translations, using red film to decipher the code, and then joining up with other invitees to piece together a map. To the church down the street.

4. Then there is the tradition of putting the groom up where everyone can see his face when the bride comes in. He hasn’t seen the bride all day, so it’s extra-special. We think it would be even more special if the bride would make it a point to be extra-skanky the week before the wedding. No showering, no bathing, no makeup, no shaving, no deoderant, no toothbrushing. For a week. At the rehearsal dinner, she should look like she’s been camping in the wilderness, with greasy hair and furry legs and all. That way the moment where he sees her all beautiful in her dress and everything will be even more breathtaking.

5. Ooh and this business of the unity candle! Lighting a candle together to symbolize… etc. My first idea was that the couple should do a unity painting. Using just one or two colors, the two would spend ten minutes or so painting together on a single canvas in front of everyone. Then the friends and family could line up to all add a brushstroke to the outer edge, as a symbol of their framing and support for the marriage. Then the couple hangs the painting in their living room or bedroom, and remembers always the first thing they created together as man and wife.

6. My brother decided that an even better idea would be to have the couple bake a cake together up on the stage in front of the church. The unity cake. It would be exactly like a cooking show, all set up to face the audience. They’d work together, a beautiful sight, and then everyone would have to sit and wait 27-35 minutes while the cake baked.

This would then be frosted and served at the reception as the wedding cake. If it’s good, then everyone knows you will have a great marriage together and if it turns out terrible or falls, well, haha good luck with that you two.

Kevin came in at the end of this conversation and offered to help plan my brother’s wedding if my brother ever marries his ladyfriend, which he totally should do – if for no other reason than the beauty of standing up in front of all your friends and family and taking vows while surrounded by love and, obviously, wearing squirrel costumes.

It’s after two in the morning. I am – how many of my posts start this way? – exhausted. Exhausted for all of the normal suburbanite reasons… errands, McDonalds playground, art classes, running around and helping Graham walk along the top of a long rock wall while I held his hand for 30 minutes after Nicolaus’ art class was over because it’s too awesome to hear him say “I! Am! UP! Inda! SKY.”

And I’m still feeling hung over from last night. Yesterday was my nephew’s 7th birthday, which we celebrated by taking all of the children to a rave. The crowd was intense even on a weeknight and everywhere we moved we had to avoid bumping into people, all of them dancing and moving and spinning and writhing, sometimes in rhythm and sometimes not to the pounding music. Graham and Nicolaus were totally zonked by the flashing lights, and the wall of television screens showing random sequences that I think were supposed to be arty. There was one with a giant dog singing Home Home on the Range, and another one with vegetables singing about how much they adore their SUVs. My sister in law served “special” cupcakes, which only fueled the children’s manic state. It was a wild time, though a little hard for me because places like that take me back to some dark times when I battled a crippling addiction to skeeball. There was a time – sometime after I saw the movie Nadia – when I was certain that the Olympic Skeeball team would discover me, and my life would never be the same.

So yeah. I’m tired. This thing of running around to birthday parties and art classes and playgrounds and things requires a lot more physical movement than I like to do. I was born a sedentary, indoorsy creature. It takes energy just to be somewhere besides home.

And! I’m trying to spend a few hours on artwork every night after the boys go to bed.

Tonight I painted a picture of a tricycle, based on this earlier one, but with more detail:

Then I spent two hours gluing and matting and cellophaning a series of three portraits I did of a mom who died recently of breast cancer. And so there I am, sitting at my dining room table, surrounded by tape and glue dots leftovers and exacto knives and watercolor brushes and tin foil and cellophane which OH MY GOD won’t stop clinging to everything, thinking about how life is too fragile and short and tragic and oh lord I love my kids so much and I desperately want no one to ever die.

Then I matted the trike, and felt much better. Yay, tricycle!

Except woah. It all took longer than I thought it would. After spending a couple of hours with glue dots and I’ve decided I don’t like glue dots anymore. They seemed so cool at first but after I’d peeled and used 50 glue dots, there were little squares of paper scattered everywhere and hey! What they need to invent is glue dots but like in some sort of liquid form, or in a solid stick – so you can glue things together without generating all this confetti.

So now it’s almost three in the morning, and the boys will be awake in fewer hours than I need to sleep. I’m going to hate that tomorrow. Ohhhhhhhh I am dumb for staying up this late.

Last night Nicolaus had a spell cast on him that allowed him to magically unlock the thing around words that makes it so you can’t read them, and so the words just kind of like BURST OUT!

That’s how he put it, and I really can’t make it sound any better or more exciting. He ran around the house, wildly grabbing whatever he could find and sounding it out. “B-OO-K. Book! It says it’s a book! And this over here, what’s this say? E-A-RRR-T-H. EAR-T-H. Oh, Earth! BEARRR. Bear! O-R-E-G-A-NN-O! Oregano! I don’t know what that is!”

The magic wore off by bedtime, but still. It’s a start.

It’s been a lot harder than I thought it would be to teach him anything about reading. Kevin and I both used to work for AmeriCorps (like the Peace Corps in that you don’t pronounce the p in corps, except more with more America and way less focus on peace) and our whole job was teaching little kids to read, so we both know how it works. But it’s different when it’s your own kid, and the kid speaks English, and instead of a quiet library you’re working in a toy-littered, toddler-infested kitchen/living room with no clear workspace. And a train goes by every 45 minutes. And the child you are teaching sort of hates the alphabet and all that it stands for.

So we’ve introduced little concepts here and there, like tossing bits of spinach the blender when a kid isn’t looking then going here’s your smoothie! Why is it green? For big fun, that’s why!

He’d occasionally write things, but for some reason asking him to read anything caused him to slam a big window shut.

“Can you find the word DOG on this page?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool! Where is it?”

“Why are you like keep trying to force people to read things?

“I wasn’t trying to force you.”

“Yes you were. You just keep asking and asking me over and over where the word dog is –”

“Okay, sorry!”

“–and I really do not like that.”

So yeah. Touchy student. But a few weeks ago he asked me to help him read something, so I downloaded this thing off the internet and printed out a few pages. Yesterday after dinner we finally got around to looking at it. It introduced the letters a, c, o, t, and s. We practiced together reading the words: sat, cat, cot, a, as, at

He drew a circle around each word, with a little lock on it. I think he is quite serious about words being jailed away from him somehow… but then he’d sound it out and hey! SAT. CAT. COT.

That was it. Ten minutes later he was dancing around the living room, sounding out the names of spices and planets and credit card statements and wanting me to get grandparents on the phone because holy woah! I can read!! It was like something out of The Jerk. I’m SOMEBODY!!

He didn’t read anything today though, and rolled his eyes at me like I was an idiot when I suggested he sound out the words “Rock candy.” Because he can’t read. Does he look like someone with magic spell on him that lets words burst out? Gah!