But then I posted too many pictures and it seemed dumb to tack this on the end. So! Wooooo, here it is: your very exciting and special giveaway from the week before last. Wanna win your choice of 8×10″ prints from my etsy shop? (um, rhetorical question. OF COURSE YOU DO.)

How to win
Your job is to use this photo to make me laugh. Write a caption, or tell me what the two birds are saying, or photoshop it, or print it out and stuff your bra with it to make it look like you have crazy giant boobs and then take a picture of yourself and then write a funny caption for that picture. I mean whatever, you know?

The winner will be chosen at random or something like it.

Thanks you guys. I’m feeling quite a bit better — we drove to Macon for the weekend and who wouldn’t feel better surrounded by a place that rhymes with bacon?

Tonight I was uploading Christmas pictures when I came across the photos from our December beach getaway. It feels like that little trip was a very long time ago, and my gosh how wonderful and awful that trip was. Over the three day trip, the boys flipped between sweet awe at the beauty of the ocean and ungrateful small child outbursts. We worried about the money we were spending, and tried to savor the tiny bursts of peace. It was cold, but then it would warm up a little. We’d get lost, but then figure it out. The food everywhere was expensive, but it was warm and delicious and people were so nice and happy to see us and our horrible children. My own mood was a soupy mess and Kevin – well, he’s a good man is all I’ll say.

Oh and! I took pictures!
Like this one, of what we saw out the window of a little cafe: the curves of a bird who was sitting on a blue chair.

And this one of Graham. I never sit next to Graham in a booth because he leans on me and wiggles and touches my face and sneezes on my food and puts his feet on me and grosses me out. That makes me a bad mom and person, but it’s just better for everyone if the person who sits next to him isn’t weird about those things. But! I do love sitting across from him. Because of look:

After lunch that day we walked to the beach, where I took well over four thousand pictures. All of which I’m going to share with you RIGHT NOW!

I am feeling weepy, and I don’t know why.

I shouldn’t, everything has been beautiful this week. The weather warmed up, all of my holiday orders made it out the door, Kevin has four days off in a row, and Christmas was as peaceful and full of joy as possible.

I’m doing better, I think, but not all the way. Maybe that’s why I feel weepy. But we pulled it off, we packed together a perfect little Christmas for the boys. I got the house to a first-world level of clean. There was music from pandora.com jingling on the laptop while we threw cotton balls all over the living room and pretended it was snow. That’s what people do, right? We scooped them up into blobby snowmen, made cotton angels, and swung heaping handfulls of the allegedly frozen white stuff at each other. That shit is everywhere now, and twice I had to steer Nicolaus away from giving Graham detailed history lessons about slavery in the south, but man it was beautiful.

Then Kevin and the boys made a real gingerbread house, the kind that normal people make. We talked all about Santa at length and tucked the boys in early just like normal people would. Not super early, but you know. Earlier.

They slept until 10:00. In the morning. On Christmas morning! Freaky freaks.

Then we had our day. And oh my gosh, these kids are so dang awesome. They squealed and played and ooohed and aahhhed and joyously trashed the living room with turquoise wrapping paper, which looked suspiciously like the paper I bought at Michael’s and then yelled at Graham for standing on – in fact, all of the gifts had little ridges as though a person might have stood on the roll of wrapping paper – but if they noticed they said nothing.

Nicolaus wants to believe in this so very very much that he willfully overlooks a lot of crazy nonsense. Graham on the other hand said several times that Santa didn’t buy these presents, Mama and Daddy did. But we did what all good parents do when their child sees through their lies: we pretended not to hear him. What? You like your presents Santa brought you? AWESOME.
By next year it might be awkward though, if Nicolaus still believes this strongly and his little brother has decided it’s all crap.

Anyway.

It was a morning full of blinding, beaming adoration for each other and for material items. The boys love all of their gifts, and are so full of Christmas coolness that it squishes out of their noses when I hug them. That might be snot now that I think about it, and I might need to change shirts, but still. It was all very, very merry.

Then they helped cook Christmas dinner, which was New Mexico-style enchiladas, which I can’t actually make because as everyone knows the only person who can cook them is my Great Grandmother. But not only is she dead, she’s over 1500 miles away. I did my best, which of course is unacceptable when dealing with delicate and irreproducible family recipes, but still. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Apart from being a vile abomination that was likely to poison my family both physically and mentally, it was a wonderful meal.

So there’s no reason for me to cry. My family is wonderful and strong, my back hurts like a mother fucker but that’s only proof that I’m alive on this earth, my husband likes me for whatever reason, my twin nephews will be here in two weeks! To visit their aunt! ME. And any day now the fudge I ordered from an etsy seller is going to arrive and replace the kind my great grandmother used to make that only she could ever make, other than this one girl in Colorado or somewhere who sells stuff on etsy.

Maybe there are female hormones making me want to cry. Or maybe I have to sit down and pay taxes soon, and pay to send all of my products off for lab testing, and maybe we keep getting further behind instead of ahead. Or! Maybe I’m just hungry and exhausted. Too sleepy to get up and eat something. Too hungry to sleep.

Maybe it’s just that society is weird, being a person is weird, and I’m doing my best to be a normal human and wondering what it’s like for people who aren’t constantly running a narrative of their own lives through their heads. How free, how not self conscious those people must be.

Okay now I’m just being annoying, and instead of feeling weepy I feel a little like kicking me right on the butt. And holy damn, I really wish I had that fudge. It has nuts in it. Maybe I should go check the mail? What if the USPS does a midnight postal run that I don’t know about?

Do you ever keep typing after you’ve technically gone to sleep for the night? Is this the kind of crap you end up saying? My god. There’s no graceful way to end this post either.

But! I owe you two giveaways now, Internet! So here’s how it will work: I’ll shut up now. You come back on Monday, when you can win stuff that you won’t feel obligated to give to anyone as a holiday present. Sound good? Excellent.

Hey, I just realized the guy singing THAT song. Puts emphasis! Sort OF randomly. Like GRAHAMMMMM does. It’s something his speech lady wants to work on, but I FIND it endearing.

My gosh, you guys. It’s like we’ve struck oil, but instead of oil it’s all different stuff that Graham wants to tell us. I feel bad now that he’d apparently given up trying to communicate with his idiot parents. Lucky thing he’s not the sort of kid to hold grudges for more than fifteen seconds and/or until you do something hilarious or he’d be pretty bitter right now.

He tells jokes. Like this one: “Daddy! You’re LIGHTY… LOOKIN’. Because you’re lighting up!”

And this one, while standing and trying to pee: “Oh no, the tinkle is going to squirt out of my eye! Ahhhh!” (puts his fist to his eye and wiggles his fingers like pee is coming out.)

He has theories about everything:
“I know why clouds are white. Because the sun puts light on them and what color is the sun? WHITE. So that’s why they have to be white.”

Or “Oh! I see what the problem is! The door can’t open because the lock is stopping it from opening and that’s why it won’t open because there’s a lock? And that? Stops it from opening!”

And there’s a lot of metadiscourse:
“Daddy? There is a box right there. And you know why I had to tell you there’s a box right there? Because when people don’t know about things, people have to tell people things. And that’s why I had to say that because there’s a box right there and you didn’t know about it? And so that’s why I have to say that because people have to tell people about that. That’s why I said that.”

“Do you know why I’m shaking my head? That means NO. When people do that, that means no and I wanted to say no and that’s why! I’m shaking my head!”

More later. Nicolaus got a major haircut, the bird is better, I’m finished with holiday shopping, have thoughts about the CPSIA, and need to clean up my horrifically messy studio. But all that must wait because I’m packing up the last blob of Christmas orders. Yay for holiday orders! It’s the MOST WONDERFUL tiiiiiime of the yearrrr! For selling stuff.

I’m on my way to take my mom to the airport, so this’ll be brief but! I’m so excited about this gift that I couldn’t wait any longer to post it. This is last week’s giveaway. I’ll figure out something else for this week’s, hopefully before the end of the week. I’ve been known to give people birthday presents up to two years after their actual birthday, so you know.

And now, I give you! Your very own set of holiday ornaments, featuring many of your hilarious and awesome nerdy pet peeves. There are also blank ones included so you can write in other peeves.

To make them, here’s what you do:
1. Print. Print print! Heavy paper is better, but that’s up to you.
2. Cut on the dotted/dashed lines. It’s just like kindergarten wheee!
3. FOLD. I only drew folding lines on the first few because they looked bad and I got bored of drawing folding lines. Sorry. The best way to fold these is to hold them up to the light and make sure the two sides match up.
4. Cut out the ornament.
5. Get some string. Or embroidery floss. Or thread. Or fishing wire. Or… string. Cut it into four-inch pieces.
6. Make a loop with the string. Glue the loop to the inside of your folded ornament, and while you’re at it squish the two halves together to glue them shut.
7. Hang them up! You can also paint them with glitter if you want to be extra fancy.

Sorry for running away now. I will post pictures of the finished product and answer any questions/fix any problems with these as soon as I get back from not making my mom late by blogging while she runs around and frantically gets ready to leave.

Download your ornaments! Do it! Do it now!

(comments now open, sorry I was rushing. Thank you Lara for letting me know! (not that I’m fishing for you to leave a comment, I just didn’t want you to think I closed comments to be a jerk.))