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.