I have a whole other post almost written out but I’m too sleepy to make sure it makes any sense. It’s about my children being pointlessly cute and difficult, and about our trip, and about all of the many and exciting things that are going on all the time.

But none of that matters, because I have a hair appointment tomorrow afternoon and don’t yet have a hairstyle picked out. I want something:

A little bit funky
But not like I’m in denial of being a mom
But not mom hair
But really easy because I am a mom
Either long enough to pull back into pigtails OR short enough that it’s off my neck

Also the haircut should not accentuate the fact that I’ve gained a bit of weight.

My hair is: insanely thick, very dark brown. Wavy.

Help! Please please link me to pictures of the perfect mom/artist/not too old but not in denial of her age cut. Pictures are mission-critical. I’m in Texas for the week. If I don’t bring pictures with me I’ll end up looking like that lady from Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

Which looks great! On her! You know, but it’s just that I’m not sure I have time to dress quite that fancy every day.

This week we went and picked up 21 boxes, weighing 25 pounds each, full of Nerdy Baby flash cards. I’m a dizzying combination of giddy because OMG wooo! and freaked out because all of our money has now been converted into things we cannot eat.

It’s freaky. And takes up a lot of square footage. But then again: woooo! The ABC cards are a little smaller now, on sturdier paper with super cute rounded corners.

And — wait, did I post about this already? I’m really tired and feeling dejavuish — I’m now offering the Nerdy Baby numbers in flash card form.

They’re laminated and they look like they were made by a real company, rather than a grown woman whose socks rarely match because she gave up on basic levels of dignity and grace that time she walked around all day with a giant Ernie and Bert sticker on her butt.

So I’m excited. But also nervous and what’s the word? Where you have freaky stressful dreams about making one easy choice that turns out to ruin everything for everyone? I believe the Latin phrase is wigged out.

Because you see, in between the time when I placed the order and the time we backed our little pickup truck up the loading dock of the printer’s warehouse, the economy took a serious crap and everyone stopped buying everything.

But maybe? Maybe these are like very magic beans.

I just signed up for twitter. I’m a late adopter of all things cool, and now I think it’s starting not to be cool anymore? Not sure. Anyway! Here’s my thingy: https://twitter.com/boogalooooooooo

A couple of months ago a kind reader alerted me to a problem. Whenever she tried to read this blog from her phone, she got all these crazy ads for Viagra and Flickr and stuff. I don’t want my readers to have to deal with that crap! So I helpfully suggested that she throw away the phone and get a new one, one that doesn’t let you read blogs because that just sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? A blog-reading phone? Slippery slope, man. Slippery slope. Next we’ll have novel-reading radios and washing machines that alert you whenever it’s time to move things into the dryer. This cross-contamination of electronic devices is exactly the sort of thing the Shakers and the Amish were worried about, and look. They were right.

But still, the spam thing was disconcerting. So whenever I’ve had a little quiet time in the evenings, I’ve tried researching the problem. And a few times I also tried to fix it, but it didn’t work. I’m just this idiot you know?

So continuing along these lines, this morning I woke up bright and early, shot my wordpress blog in the face, went to breakfast, came home, and tried to reassemble my files with a third grade understanding of how the internet works. No matter what I did, every page on the site brought up a nice clean blank page.

And I was trying to stay in a good mood, even though what? Back up my database consistently? Why would I do that?

Meanwhile Nicolaus was running around the apartment, gathering up materials and demanding tools and announcing loudly that he URGENTLY needed to build a working computer. And I — because oh ho I know so very much about computers — told him that computers are much more complicated than he might realize. We need to get a book, I said, and draw plans.

He left the room.

I dug into my files, googled for ideas, and kept going.

A minute later he skipped back in and waved a drawing at me. “See? It’ll be easy! THIS is the case, and we can build that out of just about an old extra box you don’t need. And HERE is the electronics. Those will all be programmed somehow to give you information. Like if you needed to know how do animals in the desert not get hurt in all that sunlight? And the computer will speak and tell you the answer. I’ll have to tell it all the answers first, but that part will be easy because I already kind of like know most of them. And this up here is the antennae. But it isn’t gonna really have an antennae that like – really works. It’s just there to kinda decorate it.”

I didn’t want to squish his excitement, but the electronics part was just a jagged line. I’m pretty sure that won’t work. But I did tell him that this looks really cool, and even though we can’t make it today I promised him that we will research computers more and see what we can figure out.

Then I emailed Brianna and begged for help. She patched up my blog, didn’t openly laugh at me for being such a dumbass. It had been — her words — hacked to pieces. The good news is that she is not just a regular superhero: she’s a superhero with her own web hosting company. So! I will be moving into a nice new server home over the next few days. And, apparently, learning the basics of computer science.

It’s like sprinting across hot coals, with my bag of orders to ship over one shoulder and my kids in either arm. Once the week begins, I am in survival mode: there can be no major house cleaning, no significant cooking, only divided trays full of assorted steam-in-the-bag items and quick glances in the mirror to make sure my hair doesn’t look gross enough to gross anyone out. There are so many things to do every minute of every day that if we all make it to the other side of the week alive and with shoes on the right feet, then we did good. Once we get to Saturday, we can breathe a little and slow down long enough to clean up properly, mop the bathroom floor, put away all the clothes and stuff, hit reset and hope it was enough to get us through the next week.

It feels like a giant year-shaped connect-the-dots. And somewhere in between errands and clay class and music class and swim and gymnastics for Graham that really felt like the one thing too much, but Graham said that he was going to call motherfucking CPS if I didn’t sign him up for a gymnastics class — at least I think that’s what he said; we are taking him in for a speech evaluation in a week or so — but somewhere in the middle of all of that, we are homeschooling.

It’s going well. That’s what I say whenever people ask me how it’s going. It’s going really well, actually, in the sense that my kid is partway through kindergarten, is reading and mathing and whatnot, and learning about science concepts like what’s inside the earth and how different kinds of rocks are formed and how electricity works. He’s suddenly over the history obsession, I’m not sure why or how such an intense passion vanished so all of a sudden, but it did. He’ll still listen if I start reading something history-related, but he doesn’t ask me history questions all day anymore. No more frantic stuffing his books with bookmarks so we can read and answer his questions about what’s going on in this picture and what are these guys doing to that other guy?

It only happens about once a year, but Nicolaus is between obsessions right now. Oooh unless you count a total, possibly unhealthy, addiction to this game.

I was going to write more about our little school but I fell asleep and it’s morning now and the boys are driving large plastic cars all over me. Hard to focus.