Now are the posters! You can buy them here or, if you prefer, here.
They’re not available for all of my prints, but still.

After two weeks of purging and rearranging our suburbanite belongings, I finally feels that we are now at the level of cleanliness and organization that normal people are at when they say, “Man. I really need to clear some of this crap out of here and organize.”

This is huge. For the first time in my life, the idea of spring cleaning isn’t hilarious and depressing. I’m only one more round of clearing/cleaning/organizing away from having a wholly clean house. It’s within reach!

But not today. Today I’m too tired. We spent yesterday acquiring and assembling shelves for all of the new posters. This acquisition has rocked my artypants world. I’m now set up like an actual business, rather than a person working at her dining room table. This is a step, everyone. Today, adequate workspace. Tomorrow, the world.

Shit, tomorrow’s a holiday. Okay – Tuesday. Although, there’s that hurricane and everything, so people might not feel like buying artwork much. Then everyone’s going to be thinking about the elections and all. So why don’t we say mid-November? Mid-November: THE WORLD.

ABSTRACT
I’m a big dork, and I like light and I like birds.

METHODOLOGY
Stay up all night smashing glass and spooning it through impromptu funnels like a crazy person.

RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS
Dang, these things are hard to photograph.

When I was about three years old Mr.Rogers looked right out of the television, right at me, and said, “You are special, and I like you. Do you know why? Because you’re you.”

It’s four in the morning; I worked on putting broken glass into test tubes all night. It’s relaxing work if you can get it, except for the worry that maybe you are a bad parent for getting tiny pieces of glass everywhere.

I find Nicolaus so fascinating. Sure, in that ancient and perfect way that every parent marvels at their kids, but also because he has ways of thinking about things that are startling and new and old and complex and beautiful, and simple and fivish all at the same time. Basically he’s a cool person. I like when he tells me things, and when he wonders things, and when he talks to himself, recounting these wonderful narratives. He has a talent for words that borders on superpower.

I tell him so sometimes, that most people don’t think about things that way. I tell him in a good way, I don’t point and yell “freeeeak!” because I read in a book that it’s better to tell your kids good things about them than to point and call them a freak. He’ll tell me how he figured something out, or about the way he groups things in his mind, or what it feels like to almost be asleep but not quite – and I tell him, “That is really cool. Not many people think about it that way.”

But tonight while I worked on the test tubes I was thinking, maybe it’s too much pressure. Maybe he doesn’t need to hear that he is special and interesting and creative. He talks about wanting to be famous, wanting everyone in the world to know about his inventions. Tonight as I sat at the table alone and worked on something for the total fun of making something pretty, making an old idea from my college sketchbooks into something real, I thought about Nicolaus and how kids don’t need to want to be famous. He doesn’t need to save the world. He just needs to eat mostly healthy food and drink water every day. He needs to take baths sometimes, and get muddy afterwards. He needs to practice reading and coloring and kicking a ball.

When you look at the core of who he is, he is an intensely curious, animated, creative, passionate, self aware person. We didn’t make him that way, he came that way and has never changed course. As his parents we try to find a balance between letting him be who he is, and countering it with things to help him chill the hell out sometimes. But maybe he also needs us to let him know that we don’t expect him to more than an ordinary human, that we just expect him to eat his broccoli and to talk to us in a nice voice and to try not to spill things if possible, but we’re flexible on that.

I don’t know what I’m posting this for. My parents always told my brothers and I how special and talented and artistic and creative and etc we all were. And we all grew up to be artists. So – did they do that? Or did they just notice what was there, and comment on it and buy us art supplies because we wanted them? Was it too much pressure somehow, and that’s why my brother is at Burning Man right now, experiencing the same level of responsibility and societal burdens that he experiences every day at home? Or did being considered special help us each embrace our uniqueness and fight for a creative life in a society that makes that difficult?

Don’t know. But I really like how my test tubes turned out. This weekend: petri dishes!

1. Graham is nearly three, and is nowhere near potty trained. He has little interest, and no natural talent for it and really, I’m sort of fine with that. It’ll happen. The internet is full of expert reassurance that kids won’t go to college in diapers, although to be honest I didn’t actually read the articles and it’s possible that they are more about the strictness of college entrance requirements.

The core issue is that, while he is a wonderful person with a very big heart, he is someone who seems wholly unable to predict and announce bathroom activities before they happen. Or AS they happen or, for that matter, after they happen which is strange because I remember a certain younger version of him who would army crawl to the phone and try to call the police if we didn’t change him the very instant that he peed. We all mellow with age I guess.

Every once in a while I walk around like a damned fool trying to figure out what IS that smell? It doesn’t smell like a dirty diaper — it just smells like bad house funk. You know? So I make Kevin take out the garbage, we do the dishes and scrub the sink, and start to haul the refrigerator out to the side of the road before it dawns on me that wait. Could it be Graham?

I go to change him and holy living lord. It’s beyond a dirty diaper. It’s… it’s… I don’t even know what it is. It’s horrible.

“Graham!” I say, as I use the 37th wipe and look up the number for HASMAT to dispose of his pants, “DUDE. You have to TELL me when you are poopie.”

“I’m poopie, Mama.”

2. When I saw this post on Reddit, I panicked because how did they know!?
Nicolaus has discovered Star Trek. And honestly, I’m so, so relieved. There was this whole Star Wars thing with him, and it was fun, but a five year old’s endless questions about Star Wars are hard to answer. Because Star Wars is deep and philosophical on one level, but on another level it’s about whatever the fuck George Lucas thought would be awesome that day. That means that there are a lot of things that just don’t make a lot of sense.
Now I know, I know, you Star Wars people are going to be all but no! It makes perfect sense! And then you’ll give me this big ad-hoc complex theory which explains why everything makes sense. But you know what’s a simpler explanation? George Lucas pulled it out of his ass. Which is totally fine! Good for him! I commend his skill at doing so. Except I have this kid who wants to know why every single thing in a movie was said or done, and Star Wars makes this an exhausting hassle.

Star Trek questions are way, way easier to answer. They have a vocabulary and rules and they work their nerd butts off to stay consistent. Their simplified wrestling with ethical and moral issues makes sense to a young kid.

We’re working our way through all of The Next Generation, skipping over any super intense ones for now. Nicolaus thinks Data is the coolest thing ever. Now he walks around the house and says things like, “Computer. Activate the transponder matrix to my positronic impulses. Engage.”

And that officially makes my life complete.

3. Sometimes we use candy in lieu of parenting
Early this summer we were having real problems with bedtime. Nicolaus. He would lay awake for hours, talk to himself and get up repeatedly to make sure we weren’t having lots of fun or anything.

Wait. Did I ever tell you about the time when he came out and caught us eating Kit Kats and watching the Cars movie? We were testing this stupid thing that was supposed to polish scratches out of DVDs. And eating Kit Kats because hey! Halloween candy is still in here! Nicolaus was all holy cow, so this is what they do whenever we are sleeping.

No wonder the poor kid’s an insomniac.

Anyway, Kevin was putting the boys to bed one night this summer and he told them “Go to be with no problems tonight, and maybe the Tootsie Roll fairy will come.”

“We – wait, what’s the Tootsie Roll fairy?”

“It’s a fairy that leaves a Tootsie Roll for children who go to bed with no problems.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes. But she doesn’t come every single time, because there’s only one Tootsie Roll fairy and there are like six billion people on the planet.”

Kevin really needs to write a book about this sleep training method, called “No HERE is the Happiest Baby on the Block, MFers!” Although maybe in the interest of full disclosure he should include the invoice for $1700 worth of dental work our kid is getting next month. But I swear to you we brush Graham’s teeth all the time! And it only works because we normally never give him candy and he drinks tons of water and – crap. You already judged me, didn’t you? I knew confessing stuff on the internet was a bad idea.

The first night of the Tootsie Roll Fairy, both boys fell asleep the instant we said goodnight. And it has continued to work more or less perfectly for much of the summer. I really wish I had known about the power of Tootsie Rolls when Nicolaus was like a month or two old.

Pleased with the success, we’ve started using happy and sad jars full of little candies to bribe the boys into NOT fighting anymore. At the end of every day the boys divide up whatever is in the happy jar, and then they gleefully eat it because omg chocolate. It’s not a perfect system, but it definitely takes the edge off the pointless escalation of their constant battles which go
“I’m going to hassle you for no reason!”

“Yeah? Well I’m going to over react!”

“NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”

Now the battles go
“I’m going to hassle you, okay?”

“No, please don’t.”

“NO! Um. I mean, okay.”

I’m thinking a system like this could work well with warring countries.

4. We’re gradually replacing all of their toys with stuff from home depot.
Okay, that’s not a confession so much as a declaration of intent. Kevin bought a bunch of 1/2″ PVC pipe and fittings. He cut the pipe down into 3″, 6″, and 12″ pieces, then sanded the edges. We put them all in a bin in the newly appointed workshop, and the boys have played with almost nothing else since that moment. The whole project cost like $7. I see a very PVC Christmas ahead…

Imagine me running through the street, waving my arms like an idiot and calling out to the world, “The new posters are here The new posters are here!!” With my kids, only one of which is wearing pants on this special day, scrambling behind me and explaining to onlookers, “That’s our mom. She’s just happy about some art stuff.”