It’s that time of year again… the most wonderful time of the year… the time when I spend my evenings packing holiday card orders in secret, away from my children and from the easily offended eyes of my non-cursing inlaws.

This year there are two new designs, which will be ready to ship by Wednesday of this week. The first is the much-requested non-Christmas-specific version of my best seller Shit Together design:

And this one, just because I think it’s funny.

Want em? I am offering a free upgrade to priority mail, so you can get them in plenty of time to shock and horrify your friends and family. All are available at my *other* etsy shop:
OMGseriously.etsy.com

I didn’t love my parenting today. Too little sleep, and then I started the day feeling behind already and then was distracted and on edge trying to busy my way through everything I wanted to accomplish. Kids do not care if you stayed up too late or if you need to order stuff before a certain time or it won’t ship until Monday or if you need to check your balance or shower or eat food. Or rather, they might care a little bit but these problems are dwarfed by their urgent need to pour drinks and set up a tent in their room and get Land of the Lost to load on Hulu. Plus their little hearts are filled with a relentless need to tell me things that are so cool because if you use a clothes pin to hook these two pillows together! And you put them right here! On the floor where people walk! And then you put a bomb under one of them! If a bad guy walks near them he will think oh, that looks like such a comfortable place to step and then BOOOOOOM and sorry, I know you asked me to to to not make shooting noises around you right now but BOOM isn’t a shooting noise, it’s an explosion even though gun sounds are really just small little cute little baby explosions ha ha ha right? Get it? NO MAMA DON’T STEP THERE!!!

And that was Graham saying all of that. He’s the quiet one.

Once they figured out that I was only halfway paying attention, they started wrestle-fighting/play fighting/real fighting. I know that rough housing is good for kids and all but for some reason this game turns me into dinosaur mom. RAWRRRR STOP IT OMG GET OFF OF HIM. You! Go over there! You! Over there.

I need to look into becoming one of those moms who drinks a lot.

They are sweet kids though. It’s hard on days like this to really look at them and see them through all the buzzing, whirling afterimages as they run and jump and spin around me but then they pick a flower for me, or pantomime weaving on a giant imaginary loom, or talk sweetly to the dog, or teach each other yoga poses, or walk around pretending to squish things with an invisible spatula, or make up a poem and ask me to guess what it’s about. Throughout the day, Graham reminded me that he is not Graham and he is not our kid. He’s a grownup artist who is also an archer, and we don’t know his name yet and he doesn’t know our names either.

And at one point I turned around and Nicolaus was saying Helllooo I amm a business man! I’m a bussssinesss man. He had a tiny wooden pipe in his mouth, a large bathtowel around his shoulders to represent a suit jacket, and was holding a pair of my jeans from the clean laundry up to his waist. Hell yeah that is what businessmen look like.

You’d think I would have abandoned all of my ridiculous stress at that point, but no.

Tonight I piled them next to me in Graham’s bed and told them Ninja Baby stories. I don’t remember why we first started telling these stories but they are a lot of fun. Graham’s story tonight was a pretty good one – it was a mediocre retelling of one of their favorites, in which Ninja Baby gets a new pet – but poor Nicolaus asked for the tale of Ninja Baby’s First Thanksgiving. All of my mental energy was gone, so the story was not only weakly developed but I kept falling asleep while I was telling it. The boys would say, “Wait — WHAT?” and oh wow, I’d been dreaming and was now talking about people shopping for perfume instead of Ninja Baby saving the Thanksgiving turkey.

But at the end of the story they were thrilled with the stories I’d made up and from the sounds of it, were pretty happy with the day over all. That’s why this year, I am thankful to have two wonderful children who have very, very, very low standards.

On the topic of television, a disturbing study finds that children as young as three think that they are too fat. While I completely agree that marketers and media folks present a skewed reality that can damage a child’s self image, I have to question their methodology. Seriously? They had a researcher strike up a conversation and then ask a couple of body image questions? Based on my own research, a distressing new study finds that a high percentage of three and four year olds now think they’re a butterfly from the planet NASA

Every year we say that we want the holidays to be simple. Every year we try to keep it simple and every year on Christmas mornign the boys start to open presents and we realize holy mackeral. We got them way too much. Abort! Abort! But it’s too late by then, you can’t very well start grabbing the yet-opened gifts and stashing them in a closet or something. So it all gets unwrapped in a (what’s a more appropriate word that means orgy?) of ripping paper and jumping up and down and eating candy and it’s just too much. These kids are little. Their eyes and their brains are still little. They can’t take it all in, so what happens is they play with one tiny part of one gift and ignore everything else.

So yeah. 2009: SIMPLE. It’s not just the spending money and the adding stuff to our small apartment. We really don’t want the holiday to be focused on toys. As irritating as it sounds, we really want it to be about family and love and baking and creating a beautiful, bright spot in the middle of winter. Kevin also wants it to be about having consecutive days off of work.

So here’s what I’m thinking so far.

For Nicolaus:
1. Beeswax modeling clay, because I’m not kidding you he sometimes sighs and says he wishes he could somehow get a bunch of wax to just play with and make things out of. If only there were some way! He doesn’t know that modeling wax exists so I expect this revelation to be more exciting than it sounds.

2. Uncle Goose blocks — Hieroglyphics. Because dude. How awesome are those?

3. A collection of toy parts that he could use to make bird toys to his strange little heart’s content

I should be honest here and say that none of these things are on this child’s Christmas wish list. But the kid refuses to read or write so he has to A) dictate his list and B) trust me to accurately record his wishes. SUCKER. What he wants is a real pocket knife. He has asked for a real pocket knife every year since he could talk. He probably asked for one before he could talk, only we misunderstood and thought he was being cranky because he needed to be changed. This year he said, “Because a lot of times I really need to whittle something and I can’t because I don’t have a real knife, and that seems really unfair.”

It is terribly unfair, I agree. Every other six year old has loads of knives. Even in the third world mothers are constantly telling their kids, “You’d better take care of your knife! Did you know there are kids in this world who do not even have their own pocket knives??”

And those children who have sticks and rocks for toys gasp in horror because they can not understand how any parents can be so unloving as to deprive their kids of a tool that would be so useful and would bring them so much joy. But as I tell my boys when they accuse me of being mean, I only had children because it’s FUN to deny them things. And there’s little point in depriving other people’s children.

I feel like we’re off track here.

Oh! Christmas list!
Graham:
Beeswax clay
beeswax crayons (the rectangular kind)
Uncle Goose Chinese blocks — he has a thing for Chinese writing. Unlike his brother who is all FREE TIBET and walks around ranting about the Chinese government. He sounds like his late great great grandfather.

Here’s where I got stuck. I’ve mentioned/whined before that this kid is hard to shop for. I asked him what he wants for Christmas and he said “A torch. A real torch. I’m just kidding! I want a toy torch that looks real. So bad guys would see it and freak out, isn’t that funny??”

So I spun off thinking oh my heck, my precious child wants a torch for Christmas, and I am going to have to make him one out of felt and that’s going to be hard but I am up for the challenge! It will be great! I will buy red and orange and yellow and maybe some crinkly cellophane and he will love it.

Then Kevin came home and said, “You know he was joking, right?”

No. I did not know that. But now that he mentions it, it’s sort of obvious. If you ask Graham a question (Do you ever worry that you might be a butterfly?) he will confidently state the first thing that pops into his mind. Whenever you ask him a question and he gives an answer right away, it’s a good idea to look at what’s behind you. Like in that movie where the bad guy was limping around and making up all this crazy stuff about the alleged bad guy, and all the stuff was completely on the wall right there? So Kevin’s right, there’s probably a picture of the statue of liberty somewhere nearby and Graham was just being a goober.

Oh well. The felt making things idea led to some other ideas. An internet friend suggested making him a little felt campfire. Perfect. The child goes pretend camping every day, often to Alaska where it’s cold. Fire would be good.

Gifts for both to share:
A box of soft/ interesting fabrics (They adore fancy and soft minky type fabrics, use them for dress up, pretend play, etc)

They both want yoga mats, but I don’t know if that’s a Christmas thing or more of a thing we buy them because they are in yoga.

And I might have to get them the DVD set of the original Land of the Lost, a show which they adore. ADORE adore adore.

Oh and bubble dough for the bath. And this cute stacker puzzle. And one of these trucks for Graham.

Right after that, I will keep things simple.

The house is quiet. I should be catching up on laundry and general cleaning and emails and packing orders for Monday morning and everything but the week was so full of movement and noise that my brain is instructing me to sit and listen and really enjoy this rare hour of nothing happening.

It’s silly for me to be wasting this time because I am so close to having the apartment like I want it. So so close. I should jump up and run around and clean and finish hanging things up and then our home will be CLEAN. For the first time since we started dating in 1995. Clean and also decorated because really, what is the point of cleaning an apartment with dingy white walls and no decent artwork or furniture to look at?

Although — Am I the only person who imagines the snark comments that my choices would generate on apartmenttherapy.com?
Because tonight I made some happy little flag garlands and hung them up and it sort of looks like a sherbet factory exploded and the casualties included my apartment. I love it. But I’m pretty sure people who live in fashionable cities and who know design would not love it. Luckily I only have one friend who comes over that actually knows anything about interior design, and I am so lame and scattered lately that if she wants to ask me even a simple question she has to physically show up at my door step and by then she’s so disturbed by how many times I didn’t hear my phone and didn’t check messages that my weird taste is the least of her concerns. Plus I throw her off by piling laundry on every horizontal surface. Draws the eye.

Unrelated: Today Roux graduated from basic dog training class. If you ever want to feel dumb, try to communicate with a dog that is part terrier. George Bush didn’t declare war on terriers for no reason. I mean ends up he DID but oh my god I have stood outside in the cold and heat and rain and dark of night for eight months to get my terrier to understand the message poop goes here. So I can definitely see the temptation to start shooting and bombing.

But woooo! The dog training people saved me. Oh my holy heck you guys. If you live anywhere within an hour of Atlanta and you have a dog, these are the people you should go see. I wasn’t sure that the trek and the money would be worth it but man. The ladies are magical.

Now my brain is specifying that it meant for me to enjoy the quiet and stillness by getting some sleep. It’s even bribing me by remembering the freakishly cool dreams I had last night. Except for the one about my mother in law climbing into a massive tank of sharks which chased her and tried to kill her because she accidentally brought a bag of sardines in her purse, nevermind the poor planing of bringing a big purse into a giant saltwater tank full of sharks, but other than that one tiny stressful dream, the dreams were all about gorgeous meteor showers on other planets.

I just deleted a whole sentence of nonsense. Sleep now.

I am fighting back a grumpy funk with more energy than I should have given the energy-sucking nature of grumpy funks. GO AWAY, bummers! I am constantly behind and positive that I suck at doing so many things. I had a dream the other night that I was taking a class where we had to submit our final paper in resume form. Which I didn’t know about because I hadn’t been to class much, so when I got there I asked the teacher “Um, do you ever accept these papers late?”

And she said, “Yes, when a student has a good reason why they need an extra day.” and she looked at me waiting for me to offer my good reason. Boy it was awkward.

My resume, when I finally turned it in said something like
GOOD AT:
teaching my kids stuff
drawing cute things
eating tortilla chips with a variety of salsas

FAMILIAR WITH:
the internet
etsy
all of the stores in my town that allow dogs

BAD AT:
Everything else

It wasn’t like a big low self-esteem thing; in fact in the dream I got extra points from her for being so candid. If I ever have to write a real resume for myself again I think I will include a section of what I’m not good at just for the fun of it.

I’m all about rallying against society’s concept of normal but our creative and whimsical life is also far too chaotic, and we have to fix that. Here are the areas of background stress we’re working on:
1. Language barrier with the dog
2. Kids not listening, not minding, fighting and/or playing LOUD OMG SHOOTING GAMES whenever they aren’t being directly engaged
3. Not knowing more about our tax situation
4. The house is always a mess, making it hard to think clearly or find anything or cook anything

So. We decided that these things are mission-critical enough to spend some money on. I signed up for a dog obedience class at a hippie place which never mentions the words dominance or pack or alpha. The handy thing about their approach is that I can use it on my kids and I am not even joking. It’s slower going than other techniques, but should be very easy and natural to maintain as soon as I have my brain replaced with that of a person who is capable of being consistent.

We also put the boys in a weekly yoga class together. Oh my living heck, if you have kids put them in yoga right this very second! Because not only does it teach them to find balance and their center and to calm themselves when they are overstimulated or upset, but also the cuteness of tiny people on little mats doing yoga is unreal. I wish the place would also take dogs, but they don’t.

Last week I went through every month’s expenses and came up with a much clearer picture of how much we’re going to need to report for my income. A little depressing, but it feels much better to know than to wonder.

Kevin took last Friday off and we used the three day weekend to kick as much [cuss word that means bottom]f as possible on the apartment. We started with a trip to IKEA, a place I find fascinating and disturbing and attractive and repulsive all at the same time. It’s like… imagine seeing a disgusting and horrible huge giant bug on your dining room table but knowing that it’s made out of chocolate and mmmm if you eat it your house will be so clean and your life will be wonderful. I have this neurotic impulse to try and fix every problem with matching plastic bins. All stacked up, ahhh they bring such peace. Has anyone tried delivering truckloads of matching plastic bins to Israel? At only $2.99 each, it would certainly be worth a try.

So I’ve been going through our stuff, trying to organize and purge and clean and oh my god it’s too much. But maybe! Maybe I can make it all the way through everything we own. And then! I want to figure out how normal people keep their houses clean and I really think it’s a way of thinking about clutter. I can mentally edit it out as I look around the room, is the problem. I’ve noticed that rich people don’t have more stuff everywhere — rich people have LESS stuff and MORE space to enjoy it. So – and I’m not kidding one little bit – I’m walking around our apartment and looking at each area and thinking What Would A Rich Person Do?

Yesterday morning Kevin took five bags of garbage out. We donated two truckloads of stuff. We put things out by the road for people to grab. Kevin’s parents came over and helped me clean some more. Three more bags of trash, some cardboard boxes, a few more things for the free spot outside.

I woke up this morning and was startled by how big this place looks. There’s still two big boxes of stuff to go through and some habits to break and wow it’s now very obvious that the couch needs a slip cover or a coat of spray paint or something but yeah. Progress.