Question: Graham! Why did you take all your clothes off?
Answer:
I taked all my clothes off becass I want to be funny.

Question: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I just vacuumed!
Answer:
I’m turning our living room intoooooo a bird paradise!

Question: Woah woah woah. You forgot to flush.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Um?”

“I did not forget. I just don’t have time right now to wash my hands and if I flush I have to touch my potty and… you get the idea.”

Question: Are you… Graham? What are you doing?
Answer:
I’m just pecking you Mama. Fwans have beaks. I’m a princess, Mama, and a bad guy did turned this princess into a fwan. And the princess has a BEAK now, Mama. I’m pecking you with my BEAK MAMA. On the head.

Question: What was that noise?
Answer:
Nothing! Don’t worry about it! It was just something that got… do we have any towels?

Question: What are you doing?
Answer:
I’m trying to cut a circle, and it needs to be a perfect circle and that isn’t easy because you have to kind of like cut it out from the middle, I mean you don’t have to but the way I do it? The way I’m cutting it? You have to cut it out from the middle or it… or it just won’t work. Kind of. And so I have to cut out a circle and it needs to be like totally perfect. Because it is for my bird, I’m trying to make her a little house and she realizes that I am an Indian and she and I are going to have adventures together after I build her house. I think she really likes me being an Indian more than me being a knight because you know why? Feathers in my hair. Reminds her of… YOU know. Bird. And so I think she really likes this thing I’m doing now? More than the knights thing or the king and prince stuff. Even though she DOES… she is obsessed with shiny things and my crown was, you know, pretty shiny. But still, my Indian headband has a shiny thing on it too so… I think she likes it.

(edited for brevity, as there is not enough room on the internet for the true number of words the response contained. He would still be answering me now, two days later, if he didn’t need to sleep and/or make me read to him all about the Roman empire.)

Question: How old are you Graham?
Answer: I am TWO. One – two! How old are you too Mama?

Answer: I’m thirty-four.

Answer interjected from Nicolaus: Woah! That’s like… that’s not even FAIR. There’s no way he can count THAT many. That’s like… wow, it will be a long long time before Graham can count to even CLOSE to that high.

Question: Somebody stinks. Are you poopy Graham?
Answer:
No. I’m NOT poopy Mama. I think my toy egg pooped, Mama. My toy egg is poopy, Mama.

Here’s the problem. I found out that with Netflix, you can watch entire seasons of television shows all at once. The fact that we have no television is mostly a good and wonderful thing. It does leave us woefully out of step with American culture, but we fake it alright by talking pretty much like the people from popular shows like Friends and Napoleon Dynamite and that Carl Saganny guy on PBS Cosmos. People do not suspect a thing.

But we don’t have a TV for a very sad reason: Kevin and I are both addicted to it. There’s not an AA group for it, but together we stay strong. We thought we had broken our addiction — afterall whenever we are at places with television we find it grating and obnoxious — it turns out that no. We had only broken our addiction to commercials and to being able to wait a week before finding out what happens next. But Netflix shows have no commercials, only odd little pauses where a commercial would be if we were suckers. And there is no waiting a week, especially if you are out of touch enough that you don’t even hear of the latest cool show until it’s been on for a few seasons.

The problem is those motherfucking cliffhangers. They have to make people remember to come back an entire week from now and do this again. Nice and all, but the problem is that when you can just click next to find out the answer to OMG WTF?? well, what do you think I do? Go to sleep?

So I’m not sleeping much lately and I’m not accomplishing much after the boys go to bed. It’s kind of sad actually, and gross.

But work is going better this week. Thanks to season one of Heroes, I finally realized what my superpower is. What are you, Tiffany? A designer? A writer? A web/UI person? A workflow analyst? Seriously, what the hell IS this resume??

Here’s what I’m good at: I can take information that is technical, confusing, boring, or annoying and organize it in a persuasive way.

This is the power I use when editing copy, writing proposals, designing presentations or brochures, putting together web sites, or pulling apart a UI. It’s all the same thing. Words, pictures, numbers, whatever. I’ll take your flipping steamed carrots and organize them in a persuasive way.

Now that’s a very specific superpower and compared to say, FLYING, it might seem a little dry. Although with all the people trying to persuade other people all the time I’m not sure why no one had this power on that show, but I’m betting it will be seen in season two. Shhh… don’t tell me!

But it’s nice to be able to explain to my boss when he should assign certain kinds of projects to me because I will kick so much ass at them that Chuck Norris will cry from how jealous he is because I just kicked that much ass, and when he should maybe give other kinds of projects to someone else, like maybe his own dang self.

Right now the thing is Indians. The Native American kind, although with the way we hop carelessly between tribes that were separated by hundreds of miles and years, really throwing in an Indian-from-India-Indian tradition wouldn’t be that big a breach of historical accuracy.

Still. Loose grasp of Native American chronology aside, I’ve learned a lot about Indians over the last week or so. Indians are obsessed with nature, and they spent much of their time choosing cool-sounding names for themselves and their brothers. They had long hair and they don’t eat chicken. They don’t know what chickens are. They mostly eat nuts, fruit, and buffalo meat. And Easter candy.

Indians always carried a knife, a bow and arrow, and a hatchet which sometimes had a hammer on the back of it, but sometimes not. Depends on the tribe. But really the point is that their mothers let them carry real weapons, and I am a whore for not letting my kids do same, even though they are Indians.

At first Nicolaus was Brave Eagle and Graham was Great Hawk, but then their cousin came over and said “You’re an indian? Cool, that’s perfect! We can play Lone Ranger!”

Oh my goodness, who knew that my child had a Lone Ranger switch? Well he does, and it has been flipped to the ON position. He is Tonto, and all day I had to be the Lone Ranger. I spent the entire day — and I do mean the ENTIRE day — tirelessly ridding our hallway of evildoers, fearlessly fighting cattle rustlers, and secretly working on artwork while pretending to do research about Indian times.

Around 4 in the afternoon, Graham declared himself the Medicine Boy, a young brave who delivers M&Ms to anyone who is injured in battle.

I set out to tell you how tired I am and how hard my day was but reading this, I now realize that I need to shut the fuck up. Today was awesome. When I was a kid all I wanted was for someone to play Lone Ranger with me, and not give me any crap about letting me ride the white horse.

Tonight was rough. Wait, no, the whole day was rough. A migraine hit me sometime during the night, and pinned me to the wall for the entire morning. The rest of the day I was groggy and off-balance, and unable to choose words correctly. I’d get close — “Radio” instead of “TV”, “Christmas” instead of “Halloween”, “Dog” instead of “bird” — you know, just a little scrambled. The headache, in other words, cooked my nines.

But! No time for scrambled brains because we had a playdate. Here! Right here in our very own home, other people coming over and spending time just because that might be fun. I know millions of women do playdates every day, but I’m socially defective. It takes me awhile to put it all together.

So we ran around and cleaned house which was somehow in terrible shape only two days after my mother in law helped me clean up. Then I ordered pizza because I’ve heard that there should be food at these things.

I did not vacuum. My brain could not handle the sound of a vacuum cleaner, so I swept and left it at that. Anyone who can’t handle a little birdseed on the ottoman probably doesn’t need to be my friend at this birdseed-intensive time in my life.

Do not send me email telling me that birds are supposed to eat pellets and not seed. Not because advice offends me, but because we are pretty squared away on the bird front. She eats a healthy mix of seeds and pellets, plus vitamins and bananas and toast and chunks of Nicolaus’ ears.

I’m headed somewhere with this, I swear. So we had the friend over and it was lovely. She is a very imaginative little girl, and she has taught Nicolaus how to dramatically roll his eyes and flop on the couch and groan whenever I say anything annoying. They had a great time.

Then she left and Nicolaus instantly turned into a cranky asshole. I mean honestly, throwing toys? Yelling at everyone? Knocking over your block model of stonehenge? Is this healthy, non-asshole behavior? No. No it isn’t.

So it got ugly. I took away his tomahawk and made him change out of his Inca King costume and into pajamas. Yes, pajamas. I know it sounds harsh, but I am a very strict parent who does not tolerate people yelling at me and telling me that I HAVE to give him back his tomahawk because it’s my JOB to make him happy and right now I’m doing a really bad job at my JOB. It was just like working at Southwestern Bell all over again.

I picked him up and put him into his bed. Done. Then I read stories to Graham while he complained and hollered about how mean I am and how wrong I am and how he is going to get up at night and put his costume back on and how I will give him back his whatever whatever. Are you bored reading it? I’m bored writing it. I ignored him.

I read to Graham about kittens, and Nicolaus quieted down to listen. He defiantly let me know, “I am listening to the story. I deserve a story and I am going to get one.”

“That’s fine, you can listen,” I’m not a complete monster.

Then he started yelling at me again, so I told him you’d better be quiet or I will tell you that you are not allowed to listen. Yeah, I know. Right up there with threatening to take Mitten Hand away.

But he didn’t call my bluff, he settled down. I tucked him in, said nice Full Housey things about how my job is not to make him happy but I love him and etc, and even with his eyes all red and swollen from hating me, we hugged and ended the day okay.

I leaned down to tell Graham goodnight just in time to see him tug his finger out of his nose. He looked at his finger and said, “I did it! I’m king. I pulled it out of the ‘tone.”

Then he stuck his finger in his mouth.

He turned and saw me watching him, and reached a blurry hand towards my nose, offering to see if he could perform the same miracle again. “No sweetie, that’s okay. Really. Go to sleep now.”

And they did.

Graham’s always had night-time discussions with his hands and his feet. Tonight I happened to be in the room and I watched him flop onto his back and put his feet up in the air. He tugged and pulled until his right sock was off. Then he touched each of his toes one by one and said…

This little piggy got none.
And this little piggy helped him.
This little piggy got none too.
This little piggy went to Target.
And THIS little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to his home. Then he went to Target too.

Then he struggled in the darkness to pull off his other sock and repeated it all again, the exact same way.

It’s been awhile since we’ve done the piggies thing I guess. And we go to Target more than we should.

I lay there for a long time, waiting for Graham to settle down. I thought Nicolaus was asleep when I heard him say, “Mama?” He said it really loud. He talks loud. It startles me 25% of the time.

“Shhh… yeah?”

“You are the Grand Canyon.”

“What did you say?”

“I said you are the Grand Canyon.”

“That’s what I thought. Why am I the Grand Canyon?”

“I said it. You just are so much like the Grand Canyon.”

“Well but… like what about me made you think of that?”

“My brain. And my heart. Like, my heart thought of it first but then my brain? Made me kind of like actually say it.”

“Is it because I’m made of rocks?” I really should not encourage him. He needs to go to sleep.

“No. It’s just. I really like you. And the grand canyon is… I don’t know… it’s just…” he didn’t finish. But I got it. I know. Because he’s Niagra Falls and Graham is the Atlantic ocean and Kevin is… I don’t know. One of those miracle tortillas. A fancy one.