Graham: What kind of spaghetti do you find under the ocean?
Me: Iiiii don’t know. Sea spaghetti?
Graham: No! An octopus’ tentacles! GET IT? Because they look like giant noodles!

Nicolaus prefers his jokes to be a little more post-modern:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: I seriously don’t think a chicken would even realize it was a road there. Because chickens just kind of go like (motions with his hands) randomly around looking for whatever they want to eat and the chicken was probably not aware that it was actually crossing anything.

Or this one, which is actually pretty funny:
“Daddy. Which is cuter — Cutieface? Or Cutieface?”

“Ummm. I’m going to say… Cutieface.”

“Wrong! CUTIEFACE. Was the answer. Not the Cutieface you said, but the other one.”

The other thing they like to do is say something like “What’s two hundred plus five thousand plus twenty minus four plus eighty-eight plus infinity plus twelve minus forty three?”
And they think it’s hilarious because once you stick an infinity in there, the answer is always infinity. Hahaha! Joke’s on… well, no one really except for me because this joke always starts when I’m driving and it’s going to go on for a very long time.

No matter how grownuppishly I decorated and cleaned this place, you’d still be able to tell that my life has a four year old in it the second you walk in the door. We have a little place up against the wall for shoes, and right now in that place there’s: four small black sandals, two bright red boots, two small metal toy cars circa 1980, a plastic knight’s helmet and two strap-on robot arms. All of these things are by the door so that Graham can find everything he needs to be ready to go at any time. These are the basics only of course and don’t include whatever else he decides that he has to bring with him to play with in the car e.g. a piano, chemistry set, all of our silverware. That is a gut-level decision that he can only make in the four seconds before we leave the house. No way to plan ahead.

Other reasons why Graham is awesome:
1. When I implemented the new “No breakfast until beds are made” rule, it took Graham two days to decide that he doesn’t actually like sleeping under his blanket. He sleeps on top of the covers with another tiny little throw blanket over him. In the morning he can have the little blanket rolled up out of the way and all of his stuffed animals lined up before Nicolaus has smoothed out a single corner of his many blankets and toys and animals and pencils and books and glass blowing kiln and cherry orchard and staple factory and pillows.

2. Any time I offer to high five Graham, he says okay and runs over and slaps my hand. Then he laughs and says “It was a trick! It wasn’t really a high five! You thought it was but actually I SPANKED YOU.”

3. He wears a bindi a lot of the time. Right now it’s a little sparkly gemstone sticker, but most of the time he uses the sticker off his banana. When people ask him if he’s a banana he looks at them like they are crazy, “No. I’m Graham.”
If they ask about it he says oh that’s just there to keep me safe. It’s kind of like a third eye. Which would be more believable if it didn’t say CHIQUITA on it.

4. He claims to be a good guy, but he uses yellow marker to draw hidden buttons and laser weapons all over his torso underneath his shirt. Those are his secret lasers so that he can shoot at people if he is “ever in a dangerous situation where people are attacking me and I can just totally DESTROY THEM.”

5. Today the boys were playing with some weird three-legged batman toy from McDonalds. The shape of the toy made them remember the old book War of the Worlds which we read last year (with me editing to make it suitable for little kids who freak out because some episodes of Angelina Ballerina are too intense) and so they decided that’s what the toy is from. War of the Worlds. Then Graham said Ohhh! I bet this is what that show Spongebob Squarepants is based on!

What?

It seems that in one episode, Squidward’s house came alive and stood up on three long legs and started stomping around and everybody in the town panicked and ran around screaming. Just exactly like HG Wells described in his early science fiction classic, except with an underwater house going crazy for hilarious random effect instead of as an allegory for the inevitable decline of imperialism. Yeah kid, because that’s the same.

6. Today he didn’t tell me he hates me even once. And he told Kevin “I love you Daddy because you are a tiny bit beautiful.”

7. We are reading Charlotte’s Web, a little bit every night. He is entranced by it and absorbs every word and yet somehow cannot keep straight whether Fern is the little girl? Or the spider? from one page to the next.

8. He’ll be five soon. Five! He wants a cake shaped like an Egyptian pyramid. Very sweet of him to think I can make anything more complicated than a rectangle cake with gel icing spelling out the words “Happy birthday, you weird and wonderful little boy.”

I’m ready to feel better now. Oh it was fun for awhile, but I’m bored of feeling crummy and ready for something new and exciting. I finished my antibiotics and now I’m on Flomax, which is usually a man drug that helps men get MAXimum FLOw of their pee. I have lots of alternative name ideas if you happen to work at the company that makes this medication. I’m taking Flomax to help the kidney stone wash out of my body, and the medication makes me foggy and devastatingly sleepy. Yesterday I sat down to watch Bambi with Graham. It was his first time seeing it, important childhood milestone moment, and he likes the Golden Book version so much that I was excited to witness him watching it for the first time. I definitely stayed awake until Bambi learned how to walk, which happens somewhere around 00:03. After that, I faded in and out until at some point I heard myself say “That’s the Iron Giant.”

And he shook my shoulder and pointed to the screen, frustrated, “NO, Mama. That. Who is THAT?”

“Oh – that’s Bambi’s father. He’s there to uh… did we already… where’s his mom?”

“I think she died. Bambi’s dad tried to protect him.”

That’s right. I not only slept through a crucial formative moment in Graham’s childhood, but I mislabeled an important character as the Iron Giant. I won’t say this makes me the worst mother ever – the worst mother ever would have stood by her mistake and referred to Bambi’s dad as Mr.Giant ever after, perhaps even suggesting that the movie The Iron Giant is in fact a sequel to Bambi in which the deer have had to learn to inhabit massive metal casings in order to survive – but the weekend overall was not my finest work.

You have no idea how many drafts of blog posts are saved in this wordpress thing. Most of them are about school because other than fighting to keep the house clean, that’s all I’ve been up to: feeling tired and teaching the kids while pretending not to feel tired.

The year is so fresh, it’s too soon to call it our best homeschool year yet but I’m going to go for it anyway. Best year yet! Everyone says it takes awhile to find your footing, the first year is bumpy and everyone is RIGHT. But this year I’m winging it a tiny bit less. I know these kids now and what they need to learn and how they are most likely to learn it. My natural tendency is to ignore skills and focus on how to learn and how to reason and how to ask meaningful questions and try new things, and I still think that’s the way to go for younger kids, especially ones who are sensitive about making mistakes. For the last two years we’ve done mostly activities and painting and nature walks, with less emphasis on plain oldfashioned practice.

But over the summer Nicolaus stretched up into second-grader clothes and now has two front loose teeth. He is old enough to do some sit-down-and-learn-by-rote work without it injuring his very spirit. And Graham wants to do this kind of work so hey, why not.

So yay work! But also, yay for learning about the big wide world at the same time. Last week was all about the sun. I started with the sun because it’s a big massive thing that everyone recognizes and wonders about. It’s a familiar, kid-friendly topic that can stay simple and sweet with folk tales about what makes night and day or can go to in-depth science about solar flares. Last week was a fun mix of simple and complex. We looked at a lot of art from different cultures representing the sun, read poems, heard songs, and spent an awful lot of time playing with prisms, color filters, water, a thermometer, a plastic reflective parabola and of course sunlight.

We were going to also make sunprints and a crude sundial but it rained through the last part of the week so we weren’t able. I kept thinking we’d work on those things over the weekend (and we may still do them) but the new week has already started and oh my gosh, the year is moving too fast already.

The boys love their daily work so much that on Saturday and Sunday they begged me to give them more to do. I refused because I’m MEAN and wasn’t feeling well and dudes, seriously? You want more math problems?

Which reminds me, I’m going to start keeping a running chart:
# of times today that Graham said he hates me: 4
# of times today that Graham said he loves me: 10
Net: 6 love yous
Up two from yesterday. GOOD DAY.

Nicolaus made two Ard School flags. The first one had the word ARD in big fancy letters, followed by an expression of frustration over the ridiculous spelling of the word school. Then he covered it with decorations and two giant rectangles which said CMIRCHL. I’ve learned not to guess, so I asked “Tell me about these rectangles?”

“Oh, those are commercials for our family’s business. See the cell I drew in this one? And there’s a NB there for Nerdy Baby.”

We go out of our way to limit the amount of advertising that our kids see every day because we worry that too much advertising can cause children to grow up to become marketing directors. And yet, he’s putting banner ads on our school’s flag. Which oh my goodness how much money could our government make by selling ad spots on the American flag? We’d be out from the deficit within six months. They’d only sell spots to companies like American Eagle Outfitters and Bank of America. Not unpatriotic places like the International House of Pancakes or On the Border.

I raved about the flag idea and started to hang it up, but then he took it back from me. “Actually, I think I want to make a bunch of flags and have you pick out the best one.”
So that’s just what he did. I chose the one that was ad-free, so it is hanging up now in our school area.

Then he announced that every week he is going to make coins for us to use as currency within the Ard School. He planned to create handmade copper coins featuring the theme of each week. This wonderful idea made it down to his basement workshop and back exactly twice, but the two little coins he made were really neat. My favorite is copper with flared ridges around the edges and the word SUN stamped into the center.

This week we are studying the UNIVERSE. I wonder what his coin will look like. But no matter what it looks like, here’s what I know:
I just closed my eyes for a second and instantly started dreaming about a houseful of people flying kites through the skylights. It’s early, but the day might be done.

I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about what needed to improve about the Ard School this year. I included Graham in all of our studies and art projects last year (which feels weird to say because we only took a week break. The end of last schoolyear was not that long ago), but I never gave him any real work to do. His biggest challenge was going one minute without blurting out a dozen questions all unrelated to anything I was teaching them right at that moment. For a four year old, that’s a big challenge, but still. Time for him to man up and do a little work.

I also thought about the various times where a sit-down-I-am-going-to-teach-you-this-now lesson ended with me feeling frazzled and frustrated and one or both kids feeling pouty and hatey. It wasn’t all the time, but any time an educational lecture goes far enough off the rails that the students are in tears and the teacher wants to be drunk, that is a serious sign that the teacher has done something all wrong. A few things are changing on this front:
1. When both kids are involved, I need to work harder to make the lesson work for each of their ages. If I go over Graham’s head for more than a few seconds, he tunes me out and starts listening to the voices that all four year olds have in their heads. The voices that tell them things like “You’re a kitty!”

So he ends up crawling on my face meowing while I’m trying to read to Nicolaus about Rosa Parks.

2. Nicolaus needs ways he can keep going to learn more about what we’re studying. This will get easier as his reading improves, but in the meantime I’ve been putting on documentaries for him. He watches them with a drawing pad and pencil and takes notes and draws concepts that they cover.

3. I need to get better at anticipating the downhill slide and changing the mode we’re all in before things get out of hand. Whether the problem right then is me or them, begging my kids to let me finish a book is not the way to go. (I’ll pause here so you can read that last part smugly to someone you know who agrees with you that parents should never negotiate or ask their children to do anything more than once. Now laugh at me. Now come back and read more. I’m on a horse!)

4. Earlier bedtime and cleaner work space for everyone! Yay!

5. Stone cold bribery. There is a candy jar, you see.

So here is our improved morning routine: When the boys get up, they have to fix their beds before I will feed them. Back when I worked at Kindercare one of the rules for teachers was you NEVER EVER use food or water as a reward or punishment, and that included withholding a meal or snack until the kid did what you wanted them to do. Well over the last few weeks I found out exactly WHY they didn’t want us to do that: because it’s too awesome and would make everyone’s job too incredibly easy. I’m telling you, forget Santa. I’m making a list, I’m checking it twice, I’m gonna starve whoever’s naughty and feed whoever is nice

The first few days we had drama, but once they realized I was serious they hopped to it. Now they are disturbingly cheerful about fixing their beds and even volunteer to fix MY bed just because fixing beds is so fun.

So yay. Boys wake up, fix their beds, go to the bathroom and stuff, then come to the table. While they eat aha! I have a trapped audience! We do a little school lesson while they eat. A massive wall-sized whiteboard in the dining room won’t make it to the home page of Apartment Therapy, but it works beautifully for morning discussions.

When they are finished with breakfast, they put their plates away, wipe down the table and grab their folders and their work trays. Each kid has a metallic bubble mailer that closes with velcro. At night I put their stuff for the day in that mailer, so every day their work and other stuff feels a tiny bit like opening a present. This morning whn Graham picked up his school work and carried it to the table he said, “Mama? I love you.” in the most sincere I love you voice.

Then the boys sit and work on all of the math and reading problems that the magical work tray fairy left for them overnight. They work with freakish joy and enthusiasm, determined to barrel through and finish the day’s work all in one sitting. It’s crazy. Oh and when the work is finished, they can pick one candy because yay! Work!

That’s just the morning stuff but as I type I am realizing how very tired I am. My eyes feel heavy. Pretty soon I’ll start typing nonsense about fish. More tomorrow.

See, I have these kidneys. They are shaped like giant beans. Instead of growing bean plants, mine growing tiny stabby crystals that rake along my sides on their way to the bladder. The bladder then feels left out and so develops an infection. Then my intestines figure since I’m distracted with all the peeing, they can just slack off on their job until my stomach hurts. At some point in all of this a doctor will give me medicine and tell me not to drink any more caffeine, maybe ever. So I stop drinking tea, switch to water, and get hit with a migraine and the whole thing makes me feel evermore excited about my brain-in-a-jar idea.

Kevin does not like this idea. Dude. If your problem is that brains look gross, I don’t see why the jar would have to be clear. It could just as easily be a sealed case with opaque sides. We could decorate the sides with cute stickers. I would also be willing to have my thoughts transferred into a server that he can converse with me via an iphone app. I’m not going to amputate my body right this minute; no need to rush into anything. Just keep an open mind, is all I want. I support your dream to someday own a little bit of land where we can have goats and chickens. I think you should support my dream of someday existing without a biological human body. Bodies break, they hurt, they move too slow, they need food and sleep and exercise and sun but not too much of any of those things. And I’m really fine with all of that, but it’s my guts that I hate. Everything in the middle just makes life so much harder than it has to be.

So that’s where I’ve been. On the couch, trying to stay awake long enough to do anything, trying to get comfortable around the throbbing bean pain and the stomach pain and the pee pain.

I promise I’m not whining. These are the plain facts of what the week was like. It’s like that old saying: if I could somehow wish kidney stone pain on my worst enemy, I would do it. Because it hurts!

Three other things I’ve been working on:
1. Last week I decided that all of the rooms in the house could be clean all at the same time. Impossible! you say! ALL the rooms? No way can it be done! No person has ever done it.
Well, you’re right. I was not able to do it. But I did get the office cleaned out, and I made our bedroom look like someone might live there by choice. I also got the bathrooms to shine and made great progress on the living room. It’s that last mile that gets me. The last mile is a cuss of a swearword.

2. Planning out the new school year. The boys are on a break this week, and today they asked me to pretend it was a school day. NERDS.

Anyway, we’re excited. Same concept we’ve done before, digging into topics chronologically from the big bang up to the present. This year I also want to move Nicolaus toward doing more work on his own, want to get him reading independently. They are taking a bunch of outside classes too, and in addition to all of that Nicolaus requested 1000 hours learning how to do metalwork.

It’s a lot to do, but it’s all worth doing. The trick will be to sustain the energy to do it all.

3. Gearing up for the holiday season. For anyone in retail or manufacturing, you know that it’s already Christmastime. I’m packing up boxes of flashcards and other goodness to ship out to retailers every day, trying to make sure we will have all of the inventory we need to cover the next four months, trying to make sure I store enough calcium in my body so that I can crystalize it into stone form in time for the holiday rush.
What? Sorry, there is hydrocodone in my house. I haven’t taken any because it makes me throw up but still. It’s here and that should tell you something. So September and October are going to be the most intense. In a good way, but still. I’m glad I got my house sort of clean and went ahead and got my quarterly health issue out of the way.