* BoogalooMama joined *
* roodawg joined *

roodawg: hey
BoogalooMama: hi
roodawg: sup
BoogalooMama: i am sooooo tired
roodawg: sorry. sux. hey when you have a chance -
roodawg: can you take me out?
BoogalooMama: what?
roodawg: i need to go out.
BoogalooMama: i just took you out
roodawg: i know you just took me out but I didn’t pee and
BoogalooMama: YOU WERE OUTSIDE ONE MINUTE AGO.
roodawg: I need to go out.
BoogalooMama: Why the fuck didn’t you pee when I took you out? You just stood there
BoogalooMama: like Why are we out here?
roodawg: lol
BoogalooMama:
BoogalooMama:
roodawg: r u mad?
BoogalooMama: No.
roodawg: r u going to take me out now?
BoogalooMama: no
roodawg: but i need to go out
BoogalooMama: f u. it is 4 in the morning. you wouldn’t pee outside last night before bed and so you woke me up in the middle of the night so you could stand there and do nothing. you can wait til daylight.
roodawg: ok
roodawg: fine
roodawg: i will just pee in my crate
BoogalooMama: do NOT pee in your crate
roodawg: I am going to pee in my crate if you don’t take me out
BoogalooMama: Dude. I’m already back in bed. you really can’t hold it?
roodawg: brb
BoogalooMama: k
roodawg: back
BoogalooMama: DID YOU PEE IN YOUR CRATE
roodawg: hahahhalol yes
BoogalooMama: can’t believe you just did that
roodawg: lol right?
roodawg: so will u take me out now
BoogalooMama: NO
roodawg: pls?
BoogalooMama: no! go tf to sleep.
BoogalooMama:
roodawg: hey you still on?
BoogalooMama: yes for now
roodawg: ok well. Someone peed on my towel.
BoogalooMama: YOU
roodawg: someone peed all over my towel and i can’t sleep on it.
roodawg: this rly sucks.
BoogalooMama: Rouuuuuuuu go to sleeeep
roodawg: but it’s wet
BoogalooMama: night.

*Graham_man_2005 joined*

Graham_man_2005: hi guys!
roodawg: hey
BoogalooMama: hi sweetie
Graham_man_2005: can I sleep in your bed
BoogalooMama: Y but go potty first
Graham_man_2005: ok BRB!
Graham_man_2005: back. I went but now my underwear is SUPER WET lol
BoogalooMama: omg
roodawg:ROFL
roodawg:awesome

*BoogalooMama left*

Oh or! And! Maybe! Instead of being all better by Saturday, he could be glassy eyed with a fever that laughs at our feeble generic Tylenol. The head to toe rash and the fever were disconcerting but the scariest symptom, the one that made us watch and worry and finally take him in to the nearest urgent care place: he was quiet. Even when he was awake, he wouldn’t talk to us because the energy to speak was just too much.

If we offered him food, drinks, hugs, attention, toys, milkshakes, and/or movies about talking dogs he would either close his hot little eyes and shake his head no. If we were really pushy he would whisper, “I want everyone to leave me completely alone.”

Nicolaus has never wanted us to leave him completely alone in his life. Who would he talk to if he was completely alone? It makes no sense.

We made it into the clinic right before they closed. He was outraged by the sudden invasion of the strep test and told the nice lady in a tearful whisper that excuse me, but people don’t really like when you just jab things down their throats and almost choke them. She apologized, he accepted but kept a damned close eye on her.

The test came back almost immediately. Strep dang throat.

Which! If you ever need a babysitter I highly recommend strep throat. Your child will lay down next to you and not only will he NOT ask for anything, he will in fact insist that you leave him completely alone.

The sitter leaves once you start antibiotics though; this morning he woke up chatting and being silly and ate an entire piece of toast, and now is building alien castles with blocks and using masking tape to hold it all together before Graham can knock it down.

Will we all get strep too? Will Graham escape? Stay tuned for the exciting adventures of Infectious the Speckled Boy!

Oh my god I hope I don’t get it.

Nicolaus is spotty. It started around his waist – so we wrongly suspected and accused the corduroy pants of doing this – but then it wicked its way up his stomach to his chest and around his back. By the time we got to the doctor his face and arms and legs and feet were all dotted with lacy little red marks.

He’s fine. It’s a virus, is all. His fever comes and goes and he’s being the sweet wonderful creature we always meet whenever he has a fever, the creature who is so pathetic and loving that it makes me want to give him sweet tarts in place of chewable tylenol. He won’t let me call him “my speckled child” or even Speck for short. It’s a bummer.

His invention ideas for this week:
1. A tiny portable humidifier that you charge all day, then snuggle with at night.
2. A kind of toolbelt device for pediatricians to use, so they don’t have to have so many buttons and tools and everything in their examination rooms. This way they could just come out to the waiting room and examine all the kids while they keep watching Beauty and the Beast on the little TV.

Dang it, there were tons more but now I can’t remember them.

Graham has a cold too, plus a cough and a serious attitude problem. His new habit is name calling; he sometimes doesn’t realize he’s doing it until it’s too late and he’s headed to the naughty chair for a time out, where he yells and protests the entire time and sometimes calls me poopface and then cannot believe that I start the timer over.

They got it from Flight of the Navigator which is still the single greatest movie ever made, but really? The brothers had to call each other buttface? It was the olden days I guess, before children’s movies were at all appropriate for children.

When Graham calls his brother names, it usually starts out as joking then turns ugly.

“You’re a funny head.”

“Plop head!”

“Stinky face!”

“Name caller!”

“CAR ALARM.”

“What?”

“CAR ALARM.”

“Well, you’re a car full of poop.”

“POOPY PLOP CAR ALARM HEAD!!”

The other day I was trying to call around and find a vet in our area who would neuter Roux without A) charging $350 or B) being rude or unhelpful on the phone, but it was impossible because Graham kept picking weird fights with his brother. So I sent the boys to their room to play. I built you a spaceship! Go play!

Nicolaus took the bird and went up to the top bunk. From the living room, I heard Graham hollering: “COME DOWN HERE AND HUG ME. Or you will DIE!!!”

And when that mysteriously didn’t make Nicolaus come down and play with him he said, “Look! This is my saw! And this is your head! Sigga-sawga-sigga-sawga. I cut your head up flat. FLATHEAD!!”

He really is a very sweet boy, I promise. Sometimes when he blurts out a rude name, he quickly tries to reel it back in: “You flopface! Uh… But. Flopface is a good thing to be. It means you are NICE. People like to be called flopface.”

Last night he tried: “SKUNKhead. Uh! Skunkhead is a very good artist. He was a famous good artists who can’t write. And? It’s good to be like him! And that’s why people like when people call them Skunkhead.”

Maybe I should try this on Nicolaus? “No, sweetie. It’s good to be speckled. That’s why kids love it when their mama calls them Speck.” Though man. I just glanced over at his spotty, fevered, pouty face and decided that no. I should not try this on him now. Wait till the alleged tylenol kicks in.

New prints! Well, not super new but you know. Woot!

I’m working on some big cute equation pieces with puppies and fluffy kitties and bunny rabbits, but the week promises to be too crazy for making new art work. My groovy friend Nina just left town, and we much enjoyed our little vacation from doing school or cleaning or anything we didn’t feel like doing. Instead we let our kids play, we ate yummy food, we went swimming, we took them to a joke and magic shop.

But! Back to reality. Uncommon Goods placed an order for their Mother’s Day catalog – wooo! So I need to spend a day packing and shipping everything for them.

And the baby books are finally arriving from the bindery tomorrow – wooooo! But nearly 30 of them are spoken for, so I need to quickly get the covers decorated, sign them, and pack them all up and send them to their loving new homes. That’s a solid day’s work.

Oh and there’s parenting and schoolwork and whatnot mixed in there. And eating. And personal hygiene. Why is that always last on the list? And! It’s time for another major craptoss. We have a whole rack of sweaters and stuff that we didn’t wear all winter. Time to chuck it all. And then maybe we could make OUR closet into a spaceship too!

Thank you for all the fun comments about the spaceship. The best part is that I had time to read them all because my children were playing in the rocket ship.

Did I tell you that we were building a spaceship? It turns out that closets are the perfect size for a playhouse. Sure, when you’re living in roughly 950 square feet that could be useful storage space but really. If you could go back to your own childhood and choose between having a place to keep clothes and toys and spare sheets or your very own space ship, what would you choose?

If you opted for storage space, you might want to quietly excuse yourself now. It’s awkward. Sorry.

So! The design challenge:

1. Make a children’s bedroom look as though people live there on purpose
2. Give the kids a place to play on rainy days where they can safely jump and/or bounce and/or navigate their way into a black hole by jumping through time thus appearing to go faster than light if for only a moment
3. Don’t do anything permanent or horrifying to the walls because this is an apartment and we’d like to get our deposit back someday without a crazy amount of work.
4. Spend less than $50 on the entire project

These aren’t the greatest pictures, but here it is!

There are four stations: The Lab, The Command Center, Engineering, and Navigation. This helps prevent fighting and allows for one or two more kids to come over and play. I tried to include plenty of assorted things to push and do and wiggle and read to keep them interested.

Here is the Command center:

The lab:

Navigation: (that’s Graham operating the mapping system on his tiny etch-a-sketch)

Engineering:

Window to the outside: (The boys painted this together)

The door… I want to add round windows or something spaceshippy.

Here’s what their room looks like now. It’s hard to see, but there’s a flight path through the solar system drawn on the wall with chalk, and all the planets are labeled.

Oooh dang it, I forgot to take a picture of the fuel cell container. It’s a brushed metal toilet brush holder that was on the damaged clearance aisle at walmart. They have a pair of kitchen tongs for handling the radioactive material, plus safety goggles so I’m sure it’s alright. I handled radioactive fuel cells all the time when I was little and I turned out fine.

So yeah! Yay! They love the spaceship so far and I am dorkishly excited. Most of what’s in there was purchased in the automotive accessory department at Walmart, except the rope lights which were given to us by a kindly internet friend and the cushions on the floor. Those are six-inch foam cushions from an old sectional couch that my parents were throwing away. They’re perfect for jumping and bouncing and falling and maybe even sleeping on.
The posters on the ship’s wall are some of my larger prints that were damaged or creased, so we flipped them over and painted on them. The boys told me what labels and buttons they wanted – the only one I came up myself with was Flux Capacitor. They resisted, but they’ll understand and appreciate that one when they’re older. They drew circuits and all kinds of electronic things, and I painted the walls with verrry pale watercolor. Hopefully that will be easy to cover with a single coat of white when we move.

As for the room, those are vintage posters that decorated my dad’s room when he was a kid. The rug was a gift when Nicolaus was born. The boys’ quilts were handmade by Aunt Alisha and Internet Aunt Amy. The solar system was a project we did together.

Woooooo blast off!