My tips for avoiding stress at Christmastime:
1. Avoid the crunch. Spend some time throughout the year buying gifts for the people you love, and also put in the effort in the months ahead of Christmas to be extra annoying so friends/family won’t want you to come to their holiday parties. With anyone who remains on your list, try to spread the celebrations out over as many weeks as possible.

2. Where children’s gifts are concerned: aim low. Tell them that Santa brings good boys and girls a Kit Kat and maybe like a gently used tennis ball or something on Christmas morning. Anything you do beyond that will blow their little minds.

We had decided to do a very simple, low-tech holiday this year. Ohhhhh my gosh it was hard to do. Why is it so hard? All I had to do was NOT do something. Not buy stuff, not wrap it, not wait for the kids to open it all, not clean it up and step on it and keep it out of the dog’s mouth, not wonder why we can’t seem to get out of debt and where are all these toys coming from?? But it was; it was really hard to not. Even though I avoid as much advertising as possible, I couldn’t stop feeling tempted to buy the boys more stuff or more impressive stuff. I worried that the stuff we’d gotten them wouldn’t be enough. I don’t know how many hours I spent walking around with stuff in my hands that I then decided not to buy. A lot. I kept being that awful woman who gets up to the counter to pay and hands half of her basket to the cashier and says “Sorry, I want to put all of these things back. Oh and this. And that’s seven dollars? No, I don’t want it. I mean I DO want it but I don’t want to pay seven dollars for it.”

Luckily, Nicolaus and Graham got some cool non-hippie toys the week before from other family members. Kevin and I are such jerks that we started to be annoyed that noisy plastic branded toys even exist for anyone to buy but then oh my goodness! Graham is so freaking cute hugging his dangerously loud Buzz Lightyear doll. He sleeps with it and carries it everywhere and casually reminds us that “Oh by the way, most Buzz toys are just not real but just so you know: MY Buzz is alive.”

And Nicolaus is so thoroughly geeked out with all of his Star Trek goodies and my gosh, they both love everything that Playmobile makes and man. We cannot deny that toymakers completely know what they are doing.

Seeing how much they loved all of that stuff made it that much harder to stick to my original plan in the few days before Christmas. Especially when I found a giant Playmobile Roman set on sale at TJ Max and a mechanical pteronedon and a bunch of awesome Matchbox playsets annnnnnnd oh man mayyybeeee?? No! YES that is such a bargain they will love it oh my god. No, no. I can always come back. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll put this all back for now and then come back and get it tomorrow. Cashiers hate me.

On Tuesday we went to see Santa. They each brought him a little paper doll and a printed out letter which had been dictated to (but not read by) me. That was a joke from a movie. Of course I read the letters. The Stroop effect would make it impossible not to.

Anyhow, their letters are cute so I’m going to be obnoxious and post them here for future reference. There are days when the boys aren’t very cute, so things like this are nice to have on hand.

Hi. My name is Nicolaus. I am obsessed with Star Trek. Do you like Star Trek too? I like to leave snacks for Rudolph. Last year I left little snacks for all the reindeer but I left Rudolph scones.

Bye!
Love,
Nicolaus

Here is Graham’s:
Dear Santa,
Hi. How do you do that and why do you that? I’m talking about making the presents. WHY are you wearing a red suit? Can your reindeer really fly for real?

Love from Graham

Once we were there, Graham pressed Santa with more questions. Nicolaus has total faith though, and does not want to pick apart how it all works. Though he did think it was odd that Santa asked him if he’d been good this year, seeing as Santa is supposed to already know that. Santa was also not aware that we homeschool. Maybe the dude just forgot.

This is supposed to be the post that sums it all up. But I’m not telling it right. Because I don’t know how. We had a dreamy, low-key 24 hours. Kevin and the boys made a gingerbread house on Christmas eve while I made enchiladas, a tradition at my parents’ house. We listened to Vivaldi and ate delicious food together at the table. Graham arrived to Christmas dinner in his underwear but I guess we’re so used to seeing him that way that we didn’t notice until halfway through the meal.

The boys jumped into bed. Nicolaus went to sleep as fast as possible in order to maximize his chances of not seeing any evidence that Santa isn’t real. Graham stayed awake in his bed until midnight in order to maximize his chances of playing with the Egyptian Playmobile set without his brother horning in, until I figured out what he was doing and took the toys away. Then he pouted for one minute and went to sleep.

They didn’t wake up early. Nicolaus crawled between us at 8:00 and went back to sleep. It was nearly 10:00 before he was fully awake and ready to go drag Graham to check out their stockings.

Each stocking contained a tiny jar of bubble dough, a marshmallow lollipop, and a pretty little scroll with a letter from Santa. The letter for Nicolaus explained that a reindeer chewed up the yoga mats for humans, though he did manage to find a little one for Lovie.

Lucky thing Kevin and I bought yoga mats. We didn’t wrap them though because we only bought one roll of wrapping paper. Wouldn’t it blow the whole deal if presents from us had the same paper as presents from Santa? Or are we way overthinking this?

Anyway. From Santa, Nicolaus was level 10 thrilled to receive a box of bird toy parts — enough to make new toys for Lovie for a long time — as well as modeling beeswax.

Santa brought graham some watercolors, an Egypt toob of his very own (I have one, he covets it), and a wooden car transporter from etsy.

I’m forgetting something… what in the heck was it… oh right! Have you seen those little wristband scotch tape dispensers? My kids each got one of those from Santa. They have a lot of taping needs. Oh and! I also presented them with a very poorly constructed felt campfire set.

So yay Christmas. Low-tech but you know, most of their playtime lately is one of four games:
* We are time travelers
* We have a lot of matchbox cars!
* Let’s tape things together and make traps and things out of tape
* We are going camping in our room.

We managed to hit all of those hobbies and even though they would have enjoyed the extra stuff I am so glad we didn’t get them more to open all on Christmas morning. They savored each thing and spent all day playing happily. Several times I heard one or the other of them sigh and say “I love Santa…”

In fact when it was all over, Graham demanded an immediate visit to go see Santa so that he could say thank you. I told him we’d have to write a thank you letter. He said, “Alright. Do that, Mama.”

A few minutes later he asked me what Santa said in reply. Dude, I didn’t text the guy. We’ll WRITE a letter.

“Oh! You mean Email?”

“No I mean we will WRITE it. Like with a pen.”

“Oh! I didn’t know that.”

So that was our week. Now we are packing for a major road trip so we can do it all again with my family. Texas, ho!

Ahhhh the holiday season. I keep forgetting that the holidays apply to us as well. My own Christmas shopping efforts have been weak and I haven’t put up any decorations other than our little home made advent calendar. I gave the boys little cloth bags to decorate and we wrote numbers on them, then put small candies in each bag. Clothespins, string, hallway, done. They take it very seriously and have negotiated who gets to take the bag down on which days.

Our little tree is still in storage; we’re fetching it this weekend. All we’ve really done is sing Jingle Bells a few times, point out holiday decorations whenever we are out, and watch the ALF Christmas special which covers all of the standard holiday season topics: selfishness, job loss, homelessness, terminal illness, death, loneliness, suicide, and the existence of puppet life on other planets. We also watched the Charlie Brown Christmas classic, which is all about kids being horrible to each other and something about the baby Jesus. Then we watched Frosty the Snowman which celebrates the best things about the holiday season by presenting a counterargument to the Zen Buddhist philosophy of accepting the ephemeral nature of all things.

But remember: in their innocent hearts, children have wonderfully low standards. They are thrilled with the holiday season so far. We’ve lowered their expectations of gifts to the point where Nicolaus is telling everyone that if he gets a yoga mat, it will be the best Christmas EVER. So I sigh and say well, we’ll see… you just never know… but even if you don’t get a yoga mat, it’s still a really fun holiday, right?

That way when he gets a yoga mat and a few little etsy things his mind will be blown. Easyyyyy peasy.

I’m still trying to figure out what to give the internet this year. Last year we did the nerdy ornaments. What about sciencey gift tags? Would that be cool?

Ooh and I had a terrible idea! Someone should sell gift cards for $1 each. The gift card would look very fancy and would say $200 gift card to (made up name of fancy sounding place with a web address).

We’d set up a web page that says:
We are very sorry to announce that after 80 years of bringing customers the finest things in life, De Jardin Jewelers and Gourmet Chocolates has closed its doors. All of our retail locations are no longer in operation, and we are unable to honor gift certificates.

Then your friend or loved one would be a small bit disappointed, but they would still feel very loved because it’s the thought that counts and isn’t that what giving is all about? I’m pretty sure that’s what the dad on ALF said.

I stayed up stupidly late. All afternoon I was like one of those obsessed stalkers or killer robots from a movie except all I was programmed to do was grab a 40 minute block of sleep. I kept setting the boys up with something to do — here! Play with this! Watch Koala Brothers! They’re HERE TO HELP. Have a snack and then! Take your time eating that snack.

As soon as they were settled I’d dive into horizontal couch nap lockdown position. Four minutes later I’d wake up to the sound of the boys killing each other.

“NO stop grabbing all of my pieces! You just act like all the pieces in the whole universe are yours and no one can ever touch them!”

“I offered him a sticker and now he wants it!”

“All I did was try to show him how cool it would be if we popped his balloon!”

“NO my guy is going to marry the princess first. Your guy can marry her next.”

“You are fired from this game forever!”
“Do you want me to kick you?”

“Hmmm. hmmm. hmmm. hmmm.”
“WHY ARE YOU MAKING THAT NOISE??”
“It’s just my alarm!”
“You said you turned it off!”
“I DID turn it off. But then I turned it back on. HMMM. HMMM. HMMM. HMM.”

“I fired him and now he won’t come back to the game!”

“Well too bad because my guy ALREADY MARRIED THE PRINCESS!”

“I wanted the fancy plate!”
“You HAVE the fancy plate!”
“No yours is fancier than mine!”
“Nooooooo it isn’t, I really wanted THAT plate.”
“Well this is not fair! Because *I* wanted THAT plate.”
(Really? You guys couldn’t come up with some sort of solution to that one?)

In short, today was brought to me by the writers from Seinfeld; my boys fought all day long about nothing.

I gave up on napping, got my parenting shit together and set up a super fun art activity for us to do together. Yay! Art project set up at the dining room table! Parental attention! Scissors and glue! Yay yay! The boys were so excited that they immediately sprinted off to their room where they have been happily playing together since. Dang them all to heck.

But it’s too late to take a nap now. There’s a point where you’re just going to bed super early and that’s lame. Instead, I’m going to interrupt their happy playtime in a minute to read their stories and put them to bed so I can pack today’s orders. I know I complain a lot about being tired, so I’m not sure if I’ve ever said how much I LOVE love love filling orders. It’s so happy that people like my dorky stuff.

This season has been weird though — we’ve had more packages go missing in the mail than ever in the history of Nerdy Babydom. Almost all of the lost or damaged packages have been posters. I’ve been investigating why and have found out that:
* the post office is short handed at every point in the process
* they are relying on machinery more than normal
* other retailers are having this problem with larger packages too, and the going theory is that their customers are liars who want to cheat retailers by claiming they never got their goods when really they did. I’m all about the joys of cynicism but I think that theory sucks. Treating my customers like assholes is not something I want to do, so instead I’m going with Kevin’s theory which is that poster tubes don’t fit into mailboxes and so perhaps punk teens are swiping the tubes off of people’s porches.

I like this hypothesis because A) it means my customers are good and honest and B) the idea of someone stealing a big prime number counting chart when they were hoping to find a giant “I heart Edward” poster makes me happy on the inside. Well worth sending a replacement poster whenever it happens.

I really really am going to list the onesies and toddler shirts. They’re here in the dining room in smaller sizes… I just suck. Oooh and! The baby books! I switched to a local bindery and they have more color choices for the covers. I’m thinking this next batch will be a deep oceanic turquoise. That or cheerful grass green. It’s so hard because I have this disorder where if my choices are anything or turquoise, I choose turquoise. Will people actually love it? I mean, they should love it of course because it’s a very pretty color and what kind of weird person doesn’t like turquoise but WILL THEY? I don’t know.

There are too many other topics to cover during my little quiet window here. I’m typing quickly, definitely making spelling errors and probably babbling. In general lately I’m way too much in my own thoughts, and that’s making it hard to interact with people I meet. Which has happened before — really anytime I spend too much time alone I start to disconnect a little and then a LOT and the real problem is that once I reach this point of social isolation it doesn’t feel like a problem at all. I like it fine.

My current obsession is everyday magic. It’s this whole thing about tiny superstitions and how we can’t get away from them no matter how rational we try to be and they are so powerful and so silly and we really let made up magic tricks including ones that we don’t really believe change the way we live our lives. Kevin is so sick of hearing about it, poor guy, but I have told him only a tiny tiny tiny percent of the words that are in my head.

And now I know why people write books. It’s not to communicate with the world or to live forever. It’s to dislodge an idea so it will leave them alone. I don’t have time to write a book so for now it’s just a flowchart written in ballpoint pen in my sketchbook and a background hum against everything I do.

Since this post has become all about me I’ll add that I’m also gaining weight, which has been a slight mental adjustment. No wait, that’s not true. I’m not gaining weight; the number on the scale is the same. But since going to a fully gluten-free diet and discovering that normal people don’t have constant horrendous stomach aches, now my weight is spreading all over my body in a new and interesting way. I’m not really eating more. I wonder if my body is digesting food more fully than it used to. Would that make any sense?

Man. This stinks. The boys are still getting along beautifully in there and it’s really very cute. But it’s 9:45. Time to break it up and put them to bed.

Yesterday the orders slowed down so much that now I’m sad because Was that it? Is the holiday rush over? Maybe all of my customers are Jewish and it’s too late for them to buy gifts. Or! Maybe this is the calm before the storm that people are always talking about. I don’t know.

Ah well. I’ve done all I can do to promote my stuff so now it’s a matter of gratefully welcoming whatever the season may bring while accepting that how much we sell in 2009 matters very little to the whole history of the universe. I say this with peace in my heart. What will be will be. That’s what I say, over and over during any of the moments throughout the day when I am not busy clicking send and receive while screaming in a German accent Ve must haf our ORDERS!! to see if I can magically make an order appear.

That’s not attractive behavior on my part. I can recognize that. Mocking Nazis in ways that are deeply unfunny — not because the things I say are hurtful and offensive but because they simply aren’t very good jokes — is one of the top seven reasons why I don’t have a lot of friends, falling just above being late all the time and one below the fact that there are 14 unheard messages on my phone at any time.

What I want to write about is the boys. We’re treating this month as a winter break, which is alright because we started school several weeks sooner than everyone else (and also because the school calendar is arbitrary and has little to do with our lives). But still! Learning marches on. I need to catch up and post about our lessons from November. They were really neat. But not now. I’m too sleepy now to dig up the photos.

I also want to write about how much more self-sufficient my kids are lately. They’ve had to be more self-reliant the last couple of weeks while I’ve used the Good Dog, Carl parenting style. “Watch the boys, Roux. Good dog!”
So Roux follows them around and eats all the crumbs they drop and lets them put hats on him until he gets bored and takes a nap, leaving them to invent drinks made of water, honey, brown sugar and oranges.

Yes, I take naps in the afternoon and yes, there are consequences.

But! Twice this week Graham went to the bathroom and came back out fully dressed. A year ago he would have needed help finding the bathroom, needed someone to stand there and protect him from monsters, needed someone to remove clothing, find a step stool, and maybe somehow poop for him. Then he would have thrown a tantrum because he couldn’t push the flusher down, stripped off all of his clothes, and sprinted off to ride his trike and wreck it into the trash can.

Having a four and a six year old is much easier than a three and a five. Much much much easier. Not to pick on three year olds! If you have one, you know how awesome three year olds can be. But I’m telling you now: Three year olds are 100% losers compared to four year olds. When your child turns four you still get all of the random weirdness of a three year old, but now they can also pour their own milk with 70% accuracy. You still have to deal with the spill that happens later when your six year old knocks the cup over, but still. I can now take naps without having to barricade the three of us in a child-safe room and pretty much trust that they aren’t going to die while I’m sleeping.

I was going to give great examples of their glorious independence but they’re being mellow and kind to each other and OMG I must nap before it’s over.

Yep I’m super posty lately. I always update my blog right before bed and when I’m too tired to type words I end up with a bunch of incoherent auto-saved drafts and no actual posts. But! this week I’m pushing past the tiredness to get things done during the quiet hours. Ahhhh the quiet hours. Tonight I’m fairly caught up and even though I should be rolling posters and assembling Schrodinger’s Cat books to stay ahead of the game, the dog and I are chilling on the couch and surfing the internet. I am eating popcorn; he is not. I think it’s a testament to my awesome dog training that he’s sleeping instead of begging me for popcorn.

Hey, I suck a lot at dog training and have to celebrate whatever weird victories are available.

Did you know that if you wear glasses and you are eating a bag of popcorn, and you accidentally smudge a little of the butter or grease or whatever on your glasses and then you try to clean it off with your shirt you are about to fail at something in a huge way? I now have a thin coat of fog covering both lenses entirely. I assume it will be there forever. If my artwork from now on is all over saturated, you’ll know why.

Last night while the boys were at their grandparents’ house, Kevin and I enjoyed a romantic evening alone. First we went to Office Max where the nice people cut a bunch of paper for me, then we went to PetCo to re-establish the failed Graham’s birthday fish tank project. The lady who worked in the fish section wasn’t nice.

“Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Oh! Actually, yes. It says here that guppies need aquarium salt — how much and how does that work?”

“It’s optional.”

“Oh. Are they hard to take care of?”

“No, not really.”

“Cool. We need something that will stay alive because our last fish all keeled over.”

“How big is your tank?”

“It’s small — less than five gallons.”

“You could TRY a guppie but it won’t make it.”

“Well, we really need something that will stay alive.”

“A betta.”

“We had a betta and it died. So we’re nervous… it’s a present for a little kid who will be pretty upset if this one dies.”

“You can get a guppie or another betta… it doesn’t matter. Whatever you get is going to die too.”

Then she walked away. No helpful ideas or suggestions to buy a bigger tank. Maybe she meant it in a general we’re all going to die someday way, but her tone made it clear that because we’d already failed at this once and/or because our tank is small she was judging our decision to buy a fish instead of going home and killing ourselves.

We weren’t too bothered by it. When we have no children with us, we are unflappable! Nothing can flap us! Waiters apologize for taking a long time and we blink because what? Did it take a long time? We didn’t notice, we were too busy sitting here not answering rapid-fire questions about what makes street signs so reflective and not telling anyone to please get out from under the table. We have no children! No amount of poor service or negative you-are-going-to-kill-your-fish prophecies can stop us.

Lucky thing: the pet stores all have these racks of brochures that tell you how to take care of animals and things. We found one on betta fish and were excited to see that 1) you can have two female bettas and they won’t kill each other and 2) the brochure seemed much more confident in our ability to take care of fish.

We chose two females that were mostly white. He likes white pets. We felt a little bad for not letting him pick out his own fish but decisions like that seem to stress him out. He wavers, he hems, he haws, then decides maybe he wants a feeder mouse instead. Or a kitten. Or a scorpion. Or actually – a fish. Do they have anything like a half fish, half mouse? No? Hmmm. Can I have a pack of orange Tic Tacs instead?

The dude at the front counter rang up the fish in their weird little blue cups, and we trotted home and got them all set up.

I’m such a horrible person that I thought about presenting them to Graham already named. We have a lovebird named Lovie, Graham’s last fish was named Fishie-fish, and he was mad that I didn’t name our puppy Cute Puppy.

Then I remembered that they are cusswording fish and that their names 100% don’t matter. And besides I had my chance to name my own birthday present pet Dr. Peter Venkman, PhD and I didn’t do it and there’s no one to blame but me. Well and the dog obviously for not doing well on his GRE.

We wanted the fish to be a surprise. Nicolaus saw them first and started squealing “GRAHAM!! Come quick! Hurry! Look at the fish tank oh my gosh Graham Graham Grahammmmmmmm!!!”

Did you know that a four dollar gift could be that exciting? Grandparents, please take note as you Christmas shop.
Graham was only medium interested until we told him those are all yours, Graham. They belong completely to you. He grabbed his own hair and breathed, “Ohhhhhhwow. WOW. I love them. I really hope they don’t die!” then he leaned in close to introduce himself. He stood there for a long time, watching them and talking to them. At bedtime he turned off their light to tuck them in, and after his story he had to run and check to see if they were asleep yet.

Their names are Cutie Pinkface and Spotty-head.