Two new prints arriving next week. They’ll be 11×17″, which means I need to figure out the best way to ship a new size of thing. You’d really think I’d learn to think of the shipping issues before I design something and stick with one of the standard sizes I already have packaging for, but the prints asked me to make them 11×17, so that’s what I did. Ah well… some artists’ work demands to be carved out of ten foot high blocks of stone. Or ice! And they end up just like me digging through the Uline catalog trying to figure out how to ship it without damage.

What? Oh right, the prints! It’s all about the cuteness with these two:

One night we all were out driving somewhere doing something and I talked to Kevin about wanting to cut way back on processed foods and refined sugars. We talked about how hard it is to do in this crazy mixed-up world of ours, but agreed that it would still be good to try. I felt good. I am so persuasive with the logic and the facts and everything, and Kevin is so smart to see my point. We are awesome, we sugar-cutting cutbackers.

We drove home from where ever it was, got out of the car, and walked up to our front door where these two guys were installing a soda machine. The real kind that takes bills and quarters and gives you cold cans of Coke and the retro kind of Dr.Pepper and holy lord it is a no-joke soda machine immediately outside our front door. We don’t even have to put on shoes.

Good:
When we come home at night, the soda machine greets us with a happy glow that looks like sunshine pouring in through a window. It hums a quiet bit of white noise that we can hear from inside our bedroom. Also there are very yummy drinks inside of it.

Bad:
It draws a lot of noisy people to stand in front of our door where they talk and laugh and echo their banter all down the hallways. Then THUDclunder goes the thing, and that person just bought a soda. The dog growls every time. It’s been two months now and we keep thinking he’ll get over it. He keeps thinking that we’ll finally understand that OMG Alert! Alert! Bad people are out there buying cokes! Buying cokes RIGHT NOW.
Is he defending the machine? The carbonated drinks? Our front door? I don’t know but oh my goodness dude they’re just little 20 ounce cans. Get over it.

I also don’t like the machine because really? I really need that kind of pressure and guilt and everything sitting right there outside my literal front door? It’s like Jehova’s Witnesses and/or a zombie movie in junk food form.

Also: Even though the boys have never once convinced us to buy them a bright orange orange-flavored drink from the machine, they still ask. That’s not true. Nicolaus asks, especially when the grandparents come over. Or he’ll find two quarters and casually say “I’m going to go get myself a drink, do you want me to find more money and get one for you too?”
Graham doesn’t care about fizzy drinks. He just likes to go out there and push all the buttons. The machine is part of his space ship.

And: It highlights our fiscal stupidity. It’s now just the fridge where we keep our cold drinks. The guy who owns the machine lives nearby and we could all save a step if we simply wrote him a $30 check every month and had him deliver a couple of 12 packs to our door. We’d save all that time we spend digging for quarters every day.

But see, buying them one at a time feels like less of a terrible and constant habit. If we paid the money all at once or acted like normal humans and bought it ourselves in large quantities at the grocery store for a lot less money, well that would make us gross addicted soda drinkers, now wouldn’t it? Besides, we would drink it all the first day. Then we’d stay awake for thirty straight hours. Then we’d crash and feel awful. Then we’d start a frantic search for quarters.

This week we are going to finally end the Roman Empire. I mean it this time. They do this every time and I love the way they fall in love with each topic, so I try to be flexible. But it’s been weeks and weeks of learning about Ancient Greece and then Rome. It’s out of hand.

Tomorrow I am going to make some pizza dough. The boys will have to hold it up in the air, supporting it with their fingers. We are going to stretch it out larger and thinner, and see why it might be hard to hold together a massive empire. We will then split the empire in two, and if any drops on the floor the Visigoths, Vandals, and/or small dogs will swoop in and gobble them up. And pretty soon it will be a big blobby jumbled up mess, and that will be the end of the Roman empire.

Then they’ll have pizza for lunch.

At dinner I told the boys that tomorrow Rome must fall. They were disappointed, but didn’t beg me to change my mind like they have for the last few weeks. They were fine. But later, as I was tucking him in, Graham’s eyes welled up and he started crying. He buried his face in the pillow whimpered that he wants to fix Rome.

“And Mama? I do not mean just study about it. I mean we need to actually fix the real ancient empire and put it back together.”

And he started crying again, harder this time.

Graham is generally a kid with a light heart. A nice lady in the internet sent us some cute little sets of worry dolls not long ago. The boys adore them. Graham pulls his out and looks at them and thinks. Finally he tells the dolls, “Well? I guess I really don’t have any worries.”
Meanwhile on the top bunk is another kid who has far more worries than dolls, such that he has to go back to the first ones and reassign them, sorry, nevermind what I told you earlier, this is a much more important worry…

Now, honestly? He was just really tired. And also I’m not sure that putting the Roman Empire back together would be a good idea, no matter how fancy the aqueducts and arches of the world might become. Bob Sagat in Full House would have handled it perfectly. “I’m sorry, Steph. But I have to be honest: historically, countries don’t like being forced to live under imperialist rule.”

But Bob was a better mom than me, and his kids were a lot less weird (Kimmie notwithstanding).

I just realized! The secret real reason that parents tell their children “You can be anything you want to be” is because these conversations always come up late at night when it’s very important that the kids to go to sleep so that mommies and daddies who love each other very, very much can spend time together in their bed watching marathons of Dr. Who on Netflix.

I just also realized that maybe drama like this is why schools don’t normally cover ancient history until kids are older and less likely to cry over the end of each civilization.

So yeah, what could I do? I hugged Graham tight and kissed his wet cheek and said, “Well. If you wanted to when you grow up, you could help put the Roman Empire back together.”

“Really? And can I REALLY? I want to DO that. Because it was very beautiful and I am going to be one of the people who does that.”

“Awesome. Now go to sleep, sweetie McPumpkinpants.”

“I love you, Mama. And please tell me when I am big enough and and and just? Tell me when I have studied enough about Rome to really do that.”

“I will.”

Then he had to kiss my nose before he flopped down and fell asleep, warm in the knowledge that one day he can reassemble an ancient civilization because his mother said so.

Tomorrow we start the Dark Ages. Any ideas for fun children’s activities?

Recent dreams:
We somehow grew a new kind of fruit that had giant tumors growing off of them. The tumors were delicious! You could cut them off, eat them up, and the fruit would keep on growing.

There’s also a new recurring dream about traveling and then deciding to move to: England, Southern France, Austin, Canada, middle America, and/or one of many strange cities that don’t exist. In these dreams Kevin and I take a trip somewhere new, then get lost on the trip. Night arrives, someone seems to think we should be nervous but we feel calm. We keep going, get more lost and it is wonderful and strange. We run into family or people we know, then continue on our way, still lost and still breathing in the differentness of the new place.

Then we decide it might be nice to move there, so we start to look at apartments and things for rent. The places are always up flights of stairs, always strange and flawed and absolutely perfect. It’s a pretty literal dream about this alternating restlessness and peace that we have about where we live.

I also have a lot of fun dreams about religion that would offend… well, almost everyone we know. Last week I dreamed that a lost bible story resurfaced where God was saying “You people are frustrating and sexist. Before Jesus, I sent four daughters over the span of 200 years and no one even noticed.”

In the dream that was very very funny.

I’m a liar. It’s that grey-area kind of lying, the kind that I was so good at in marketing, where you emphasize a feature that does really exist in order to make it sound like a bigger deal than it is and to downplay everything else.

I write and talk about the noise and the exhaustion and the laundry and the many (many, many) ways that I suck and all of the ways that my life is a hectic mess. Those things are all true, and I don’t regret writing them because it will be good to look back later and remember this time and how silly and full and exhausting it was.

But here is the secret truth that I don’t mention very often:
my life is close enough to perfect that calling it perfect would be accurate.

I don’t talk enough about the good stuff for several reasons, all of which are dumb.

1. Having a perfect life makes me feel guilty.
Because even though we have paralyzing debt and my husband has to work odd hours at a job that uses only a tiny amount of his giant brain, the fact is that compared to most of humanity over most of history up until this point, we live a lifestyle that would classify us as kings. We have a safe, warm, expansive 975 square foot home. One of our biggest problems is owning too much stuff, our kids have too many clothes and books and toys. We have too many choices of where and what to eat. We have a computer. We aren’t required by law to send our children away to boarding school at age seven. We aren’t likely to be killed for our nonstandard beliefs. We don’t have to die from simple things if we don’t want to.

It’s survivor’s guilt really. I didn’t do anything special to be born in this place and time. The odds against having a fancy life like mine are sickening.

But focusing on the sucky stuff out of guilt is self absorbed, contrived and condescending. It helps no one for me to pretend that I am less rich and powerful than I am.

2. I am trying to make a social accomodation.
Is it culturally specific to the US, this thing of never being satisfied so we must always climb upward? Or is it a leftover from the feminist movement? It seems rude and annoying for a mother to be perfectly happy, especially when the kids are little.

There are plenty of blogs out there about why motherhood stinks; it’s not heresy to admit that anymore. So my heretical statement is: I freaking adore this time of my life with my whole dorky heart. That doesn’t mean I’m a perfect mom who spends every minute sewing costumes and baking cookies, and my kids and house aren’t anything like perfect but really for the most part? We are healthy and pretty damned happy.

I don’t want people who don’t adore this time of their own lives to think I am judging them because I’m not. But it’s also lame of me to groan about my life just because that’s an easy way to fit into a conversation.

3. Superstition.
Like if I notice and speak out loud about how great everything is, the universe will somehow realize that things are out of balance and will do something mean! Because I have the logic skills of a second grader!

4. Kevin’s life is a lot less fun than mine.
This is the biggest reason I do it, and it’s the reason I’m going to stop. Kevin has to go to a boring job while I get to stay home and talk to the two most entertaining conversationalists on the planet. For me, raising and teaching our kids feels like a tremendous use of my talents. His job is fine, but it’s a waste of his talents.

It crushes me to think he might drive home feeling like he wasted a day of his life. So to make it seem more fair, I let him know hey, don’t feel bad! My day sucked too! Oh man, there was poop everywhere.

But it dawned on me yesterday morning that this is a ridiculous habit. We could afford so much more if I went to work full time. Kevin could stay home and while the kids were in school he could work on making jewelry. But doing things that way was never something we considered, because I so badly needed to stay home with these kids. Kevin goes to work so that he can give me this life as a gift. How dumb of me to pretend that the gift isn’t awesome when oh my god! You sold your watch to buy me hair combs?? FRICKIN SWEET dude! I love hair combs! And this is perfect because I have all this long hair.