1. Graham’s new hobby is humming loudly. Monotone. MMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm
mmmmmMM
MMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmm

It’s in the background while we talk or drive or eat or do schoolwork. I ask him to PLEASE STOP the loud hum. He stops. Then a minute later I realize I’m tense for some reason and oh my god there is that humming again.

“Graham, what did I ask you to do?”

“Stop loud humming.”

“And what are you doing?”

“I’m speaking in my language.”

“YOU ARE HUMMING.”

“You can’t understand it because it’s not your language.”

Or other times he says it’s the sound of his laser firing and his lasers sound like different things. Or he indignantly claims that he is meditating (the humming is 100% worth it in that instance because I love the way he pronounces the word meditating). Or he says it’s not him making the humming noise, it’s actually a story being played on my computer but it’s skipping and going to fast so it sounds like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmm

However much you think I’m hearing this loud monotone humming noise, I promise that you are way way underestimating. It is so much more humming than you think. He does it between words. He does it while he poops. Which okay — who doesn’t? I’m not sure it’s even possible to poop without loudly humming a non-song. That’s why some people are so weird about pooping in public restrooms.

2. I’ve said before that Graham’s mind works more like Kevin’s. Nicolaus does surprise me sometimes, but even then I feel like I know the path that he walked to arrive at whatever he just said. It’s the same path I would have taken to get to the same sort of place.

Graham doesn’t think along those same paths and he definitely doesn’t arrive at the same places. Like a lot of four year olds he stops and starts over his sentences so you, he stops and starts over and so you, a lot of four year olds? do this thing? where you have to wait a long time because they stop? and start they stop and start over their sentence… ence…ence sentence. Sentence. so you have to patiently wait for them to blurt out the ending. Or kick them like a record player that’s hung up.

So I find myself guessing the ending. I have to stop doing this because with Graham I am never, ever right. We were driving and he says, “Mama I love… I LOVE. I love that. Mama? And Mama? I really love those beautiful… that man’s beautiful. I love that man’s beautiful [unintelligible].”

“That man’s what?”

He started over. I said that I love… You know what I really love? I love that that that that I love that man’s beautiful… Mama? I love that I love you know what? I love that man’s beautiful [unintelligible].”

“His what?”

“I SAID I love I lovvvvve…”

“Graham. You love his beautiful what?”

“I already told you two times.”

“But I couldn’t hear you, sorry. What do you love?”

“That worker man’s beautiful caution cones.”

See what I mean? I don’t know what I expected him to say, but caution cones wasn’t it.

3. His other new hobby is hiding things and then giving us clues to help us find them. He started out hiding his own stuff but quickly figured out that family members are much more excited about playing his game when he hides our things. Hilarious and fun unless it’s something like your shoe or your phone or the few precious minutes that stand between you and being late and oh my god dude where is the dog’s leash??

What sucks is when he honestly doesn’t remember where he put everything. No amount of playing along or begging or time-out giving or threatening to send him to a technical school instead of university can make him find your stuff. All you can do is clean house in detail and hope you’ll run across it and remember that possessions are fleeting and so is age four.

It’s two in the morning. I can’t blame the kids anymore — they sleep plenty thanks to my own personal ultimate child sleep training program (in six short years you too can develop your baby’s perfect sleeptime habits!). So now you will figure out that I’m not tired all the time because I have young children. I’m tired because I’m an idiot who stays up all night. Is there a term for someone who almost deliberately messes up their own lives? I’m a willful insomniac. I rebel against the part of me that says you know, eight hours of sleep really feels great. Yeah WELL. I’ll show you, brain!

Tonight I’ve been reading about this guy Bruner who came up with the same idea I’ve been working on for our curriculum. He called it spiraling, which isn’t quite what I would have called it (are we headed outward? Inward?) but in a lot of my notes I’ve drawn concentric circles, so I think the visual of a spiral is trying to get at a similar thing. I need to get a book and read more, but so far everything I’ve come across that he suggests falls perfectly into the kind of schooling we have naturally formed over here simply by quieting my mind and thinking about the purpose of teaching these kids anything at all. So yeah. Nice to know that an actual professional is well-known for the belief that I’m not permanently screwing up my children by teaching them this way.

Man. I’m tired.

While in Texas my brother and I got into an argument with my mom about the bedtimes we had when we were kids. We remembered bedtime anarchy, staying up as late as we wanted, playing with legos and reading books and eventually watching Nick at Nite (sic). No bedtimes wooooo! But my mom, hippie though she was, remembered putting us to bed at 8:00 so she and dad could watch some lame 80s grownup show. She told me what it was, but now I don’t remember. Any guesses? I want to say it started with a K. Knots Landing? Knight Rider? Kate and Allie?

Once our ma described the uncharacteristically rigid bedtime routine it did sound familiar. After more discussion we realized that a lot of nights she put us to bed at 8:00 but we were punks who didn’t actually go to sleep until many hours later. She insisted that it didn’t matter because BED > SLEEP and then she suggested that I might think about this with my own parenting: the real reason for putting kids to bed at an early hour is that parents need time alone.

Which I agree. But if I put my kids to bed too early, then they wake up at terrible hours of the morning and then my choices are either:
1. Spend no time with Kevin and spend almost no time packing orders at night or
2. Stay up late to visit with him and pack orders, then three or four hours later when the boys announce “It’s morning!”. Die from being tired

So yeah. Boys sleep plenty, but I still don’t. I’m trying to actively notice and change my bratty mental habits. Do you have those? It’s like a compulsion to screw up. It’s the same type of feeling every time, so I’m hoping that noticing and articulating them will help me feel more stupid the next time it happens. Here are some I’ve noticed so far:
* I will do that later
* Yuck, this is intimidating so I shouldn’t do it right now
* The person I’m talking to doesn’t want to hear about this
* I’ll keep this object because I can envision myself using it/wearing it/making something out of it
* I should buy this, it will solve everything
* If we left now we’d get there early. That means that I have plenty of time before we leave and don’t need to finish getting everyone ready.
* I can’t stop doing this right this second because I am not at an obvious stopping point. If I stop reading in the middle of a paragraph or stop drawing at a weird point or walk away from an email that I’ve mostly written but haven’t yet sent, police might bust down my door and arrest me. Or I’ll have a seizure. Or a comet will smash into me. All of those things would only delay things even further and so you will have to wait a few minutes until I am at a stopping point.
* I am only going to sleep for five minutes.
* I should eat this yummy thing/drink this soda pop because I need to

There are more, but this is a start. It’s almost a superstitious type of feeling, and working on this is an extension of my mission to shine a big rational light on all of the silly magic that I secretly believe in. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll stop believing in all of it. I just want to make on-purpose decisions about what stays and what goes. Because damn, today I was late to pick up the new baby books and then I drove 20 minutes north to a post office and let the lady calculate postage for everything before I realized my wallet was at home, then had to drive to a different post office and then back up 20 minutes north again to run the errands I’d meant to run before missing my wallet. My mind has got to start being more organized than this.

Today is my birthday! I’m 36. Kevin says it’s a special birthday because the second number will only be double the first number one more time in my life. Because I am unlikely to live to be 612 especially given how much I like to eat cheese and salsa.

The boys made me a gluten free cake.

Kevin made me a bunch of bacon and clementine oranges.

Roux made me some dog barf under our bed.

Think Geek made me a happy lady.

Early last summer, Nicolaus announced a reading strike. It was management’s fault for letting negotiations disintegrate to that degree by refusing to compromise on the existence of the silent K and the fickle letter y.

He has always resisted reading, and honestly it was something I had to shift my expectations on. I was one of those freaky early readers you hear about on the TV, and before we were married Kevin and I both had jobs teaching little kids how to read. Of course our kids will read. But here we saw no signs of interest in letters other than the occasional eerily well-spelled word on the refrigerator. When he was two, if you pushed the issue he would insist that those weren’t letters. Those are tools. T is a shape called hammer. L is a shape called socket wrench. I is a shape called ruler. R was some type of handsaw. Then he’d start quizzing me and I’d realize wait — I was supposed to be teaching you the letters.

This was when he was tiny though so we didn’t worry much about it. It was a quirk. Toddlers are made out of quirks.

But while his other weird toddler phases would give way, this one didn’t. For the next four years, any time any adult tried to talk to him about letters or reading he would
1. Try to change the subject
2. Say that he didn’t want to do this right now
3. Try to walk away
4. Cry and/or sulk
5. Throw a tantrum, announce that you hate him, etc.

We decided it was stubbornness and a basic misunderstanding about what learning to read involves. He seemed to think that he was supposed to magically know how to read and/or memorize and be able to sightread every word in the world. He also thought it was much more complicated than it is — I would read to him with intonation and emphasis and he’d stare intently at the words and ask “Okay, where does it show you to say that word exactly like that?”

We talked about punctuation and italics and all of that but he didn’t really seem to believe me. He was convinced that it was like written music almost, with pitch and everything all indicated on the page somewhere.

Last year when we started Kindergarten I bought a set of PDF lessons that worked really well right up until the day when they didn’t work at all. Once the words in the books got to be long enough that he didn’t have them memorized, he started to panic. Panicking led to digging in, which led to meltdowns which led to the strike of ‘09. He didn’t write picket signs obviously, on account of being illiterate, but still.

At first I decided to let the strike go. I didn’t want negative associations with reading, and pressuring a crying child to read Cat in the Hat just seemed wrong.

Besides, he wants information in books so badly. He listens to stories and books and facts for hours every day. At night he goes to bed with nonfiction books and in the morning he has it crammed full of bookmarks where he has questions for me.

But the strike dragged on. He would scowl if we asked him to try and read anything. The word STOP. The word Mango. The word NICOLAUS.

Kevin and I started to really worry. This seemed more intense than just plain stubbornness. He is resisting because it’s upsetting and hard. But why is it so upsetting and hard for him?

At his annual checkup (which is in November even though his birthday is in February, because if you do it a month and a half late every year for six years that’s where you end up) the pediatrician noticed some trouble with letters and numbers during the eye test. He asked us if we’d noticed any signs of dyslexia.

If lex is latin for read and dys means freaking hates it then in the strict medical sense of the word, yes. I actually know a lot about dyslexia because as a child I personally dealt with it by seeing that one Silver Spoons episode. I also saw the one about shooting a deer, as well as the Diff’rent Strokes about the child molester and the Punky Brewster about why you shouldn’t play hide and seek inside old refrigerators.

So we took him to a lady for an evaluation.

The pediatrician suggested starting with a speech-language pathologist, which surprised me because speaking is this child’s superpower. The doctor pointed out that reading and writing are part of language, which oh yeah. That makes sense.

Nicolaus was excited to meet her. He chatted with her about dragons and greek mythology and wanted her to look at the books that he brought with him. She was focused on getting the job done, and I was focused on not letting it annoy me that she wasn’t interested in what he had to say. Instead I got out of the way and let her do her job.

After the tests, her assessment was this: “I am too old for labels. Would some other evaluators tell you that he has a learning disorder specific to reading? Yes, probably so. But I am too old to be an alarmist and to me labels are not helpful. Instead of calling it dyslexia or something along those lines I’d much rather say that he has a superhighway for everything else, but for reading and writing he has lots of little country roads.”

Everything else she said to me was set to the John Denver who lives in my brain singing:
Country roaaaaad take me home
Back to the land
Where I belohong
West Virginia
Something something
take me home
country road

She said:
1. Phonics learning does not work for his brain. This did not surprise me.

2. But he has to learn phonics anyway because research shows that phonics is the best thing for lifelong learning

Her formal evaluation also mentioned that although he fidgeted and squirmed, she did not see signs of ADHD. That sort of did surprise me — although really he does focus, to the extreme sometimes. He just moves constantly while he focuses. So it’s more like Attention Overabundance Hyperactive Spectrum Disorder. That, combined with his severe case of John Denver Syndrome, define the challenge in front of me as his teacher.

I was honestly a little frustrated with the report. We already knew that he lives on the receptive and expressive language superhighway. He built it himself out of the bones of people who had died while waiting for him to stop talking long enough for them to get a word in. And we already knew that the issue is specifically with reading and writing. But exactly WHAT is the issue? And more importantly: what the hecking heck can we do about it?

But to be fair I was frazzled and sleep deprived and cranky at that point; all of this went down in the middle of the crazy holiday rush. As soon as Christmas was over, Nicolaus and I had a talk. We talked about the country roads. He nodded and said he’d heard her say that. He liked the visual image of that and agreed that it does feel like little winding roads with some stuff.

Then we talked about why it’s important not to run away from things that are hard. He clarified that he doesn’t run away from them, he just makes a big wall all around those things so he doesn’t have to look at them.

I understand. I do the same thing.

We went with the wall metaphor, which got a little muddy by the end of the talk but overall things sounded promising.

The next day, I made him read an entire reader. He was exhausted by the end of the first three pages, he flopped over every time he ran into a new word, then he cried and called me mean. He pushed, he fought, he begged but I was stern: You are going to finish this. We can spend all day on it if we have to.
I wanted him to see that he could do it.

Finally he resigned himself to his horrible fate and read the stupid book.

The next day, same deal. This time he only pushed back for a couple of minutes before focusing and reading the danged book.

The third day he went and got the book on his own and flopped down next to me, already resigned to his horrible fate.

In other words, I Ferberized him.

And just like that — after a mere three years of effort followed by a 7-month strike, a $250 evaluation, development of new tactics and a few nights of serious pouting — the kid is reading. He’s still exhausted from the effort. Is he back up to grade level? I’m not sure. Do we need to get further testing done, maybe take him to an eye doctor, and etc etc? Maybe so, Millhouse. Maybe so. But his attitude is hugely better now that he finally believes us that it’s not magic and it really can’t all be memorized.

To help him overcome his bitterness about weird spellings like knight and laugh, I’m trying to give him the history of the words to help him understand why some of them are so messed up.

Ooooh and! I figured out a trick to the letter y. It isn’t that it sometimes it’s a consonant that says YUH and sometimes it’s a vowel that says EEEEE. No! It always makes this sound: EEEE-UH. It’s just that at the start of a word we hear the uh more than the eee part.
YELLOW: /eeee-UH eh lo/
TIFFANY: /ti fun EEE-uh/

Sometimes it sounds sort of like a longish letter i. Like in by. /bi-eee-uh/

I don’t know what I’m talking about. But for a six year old with letter y issues, this either made total sense or helped him understand that his mother is crazy enough to rewrite the rules of english syntax and grammar if that’s what it takes to make him read so maybe he’d better just give in and read already.

Did any of the Surrealists have children? Or the Dada guys? Because every day I encounter tiny plastic animals guarding my shoes, or I find complicated waxed-yarn sculptures balanced carefully on the cream cheese. There are toothbrushes suction cupped to our bathroom mirror. Today I had lunch with people wearing togas who don’t think I’m funny for suggesting that the name Plato sounds like Play Dough. Or that he might have been interested in toes.

During those conversations we tell our dog to go to his place, and he trots over to the nearest round turquoise $1.99 mat from IKEA. Then one of the people wearing togas announces that we are in a time machine space ship and are soon going to arrive on a different planet in another time. The space ship alone would have been plenty impressive for me. I’ve never been to another planet at all so the added expense and complexity of time travel was sort of a waste on me.

Other times I find myself in public restrooms holding the hand of a person who is wearing footed pajamas plus big red shiny boots, all because that person said “I fell in LOVE with these boots and I am going to have to BUY MY boots because if I don’t buy them the police will arrest you, Mama. Because kids can’t go to jail and anyway I love my boots so much and can we please buy them please?”

Jeez. This is the kid who told Santa to just bring whatever. Of course I bought him the $7 Walmart boots. Now everywhere we go, people stare.

Which – the pajamas and/or togas might be part of the staring. But mostly I think it’s jealous stares because they wish THEY could wear such awesome boots. And I tell them “You can! They come in adult sizes…” and people laugh and it just now occurred to me that for most people over the age of four, their main obstacle to wearing giant shiny red boots in public is not the inability to find them in the right size.

My life is absurd. All parents lives are absurd.

This is me not posting about Haiti because I can’t process it yet.

I want to write about Nicolaus and school and reading.

And how we want to move, but can’t afford to move.

And the new products Kevin and I are developing for Nerdy Baby.

Oh and! I’ve been a good housewife for four days now. Dishes, laundry, general up-picking, meals for grownups, all of it. Holy crap. It’s exhausting! No wonder most parents drink so much.

The biggest change I’m working on is training the kids to help as a part of the daily routine. We got the entire place clean and then we assigned police to different areas that tend to get trashed every day. Nicolaus is the Dining Room Table Police. He’s also over the big ottoman that collects papers and toys for no reason. Graham is the police of their bedroom floor and of the bathroom.

I’m the cop of the living room and the kitchen (which are really all one room haha suckers).

So far Kevin hasn’t picked his beat. He’s been sick this week and I’m pretty sure he thinks the police idea is weird. But he likes the part where he comes home from work and can sit on the couch without first having to clear a spot. We gave away our rake when we moved into an apartment and it’s hard to move a mountain of clean laundry and books and toys by hand when you’re already physically exhausted from a day’s work and just need a place to sit for a few minutes.

The police system is working well so far. If you leave a mess in someone else’s zone, they can come get you and shout “You made a mess; you are underrr arrest!”

It rhymes which gives it much more authority than if you arrest someone in a non-rhyming way. You would think that lawmakers would try that more.
What rhymes with fraudulent banking practices?

So yeah. The boys aren’t yet abusing their power but they do like arresting family members a lot. “Daddy!! You left an orange peel on the arm of the chair! And your shoes are in the middle of the living room.”

So yeah. Maybe this is the point where I changed from a messy awful housewife into a sort of nonhorrible one. Cleaning is still a sucky drag but much less so now that I have hilarious people in togas and red rainboots helping me. Maybe that’s the secret real reason why people like having maids.