At 11:43 I was filling out all of my patient check in information when I remembered oh my god! Nothing to eat or drink after midnight the night before the procedure. The procedure must go as planned. But all I ate today was a baked potato and a coke and a stir fry thing over steamed rice. That’s not enough. So I ran into the kitchen and came back with a bowl of cereal which was delicious, but then I poured two more bowls of cereal and oh gross. I ate that all too fast. Worth it though.

Then I finished the cereal and the paperwork – which made me feel so mature because I refrained from giving funny answers to their funny questions. Do you do any drugs and if so, what and how often and how much? No, none. Do you have any piercings and if so, where are they located? None. Do you drink? Rarely, because it upsets my stomach. Do you smoke? No, never have. So it asks whole strings of nosy questions and then says Please explain. Explaining is easy! I am boring.

So we are packing packing packing the orders and preparing for the procedure and oh! oh my gosh! The new edition of the baby book is here! I will post pictures over the next week or so… the covers are grasshopper green and I’m dorky excited about them.

In the meantime we are studying early life on earth and cells and evolution and that’s fun. And ah jeez, I just remembered that it’s 1:20 and I have to be at this place at 8:30 in the morning and that is going to suck. Maybe I’m a little nervous?

Real quick before I go to sleep, here’s something that Nicolaus wants the world to know:
“It is wrong when governments fly over forests and drop bombs. Because even though they only intend to kill their enemies? They are also killing birds. A long time ago the ancient humans saw birds flying up in the sky and thought hey wow, that looks so neat. We should figure out a way to fly too. And so they built things that didn’t work, and they strapped on wings, and they tried all this different stuff and then they made hot air balloons and that led to dirigibles and those led to people saying okay wait wait wait we need something with WINGS and actual engines and so they invented airplanes and made them better and better and bigger and faster until now and THAT is what makes it is JUST TOTALLY WRONG because now they sometimes use a weapon to destroy birds when birds are the ones who even GAVE the humans the exact idea for that weapon.”

Alright. I’ll see you after I definitely wake up from the anesthetic which almost never causes people to not wake up. It’s very rare. I know because in all of the many, many James Herriot books it only happened to one dog ever, and that one was quickly revived when James panicked, grabbed the dog by its back legs and swung it around in a giant circle until the dog started breathing again. I assume this is why the procedure has to be done in an outpatient surgical center. The rooms in the regular doctor’s office are too small to swing a 5′9″ lady around and around by the ankles should that need suddenly arise.

And THAT. Is why I am going to bed now. Goodnight, internet.

There are five plastic bottles of pills next to my bed.

1. Flomax – for maximum flow of pee.

2. Percocet – for maximum hating of my kidney stone

3. Somethingasomethingcan – to help slow the waves of vomit that narcotics bring forth. Funny how the prescription for this drug was much harder to wring out of my doctors than the pain medication. They kept needing to consult each other and call me back, and then calling me back to offer different painkillers instead. NO. Listen! They all make me throw up. Just give me the stuff that makes that not happen so we can all move on.

4. Very large calcium supplements – to ward off future stones.

5. Zoloft. Good old zoloft, my constant friend who never makes anything exciting happen.

So yay. Weekend plans were disrupted, all nonessential parenting was halted, all dog training efforts thrown out completely. I keep trying to at least work on new artwork… I can do that while being lame and woozy, right? But it doesn’t work. I wake up from crazy dreams with my computer on my stomach, with Photoshop and Indesign open and some unbelievable nonsense strewn across the page drawn with the pen tool. This is me at my very lamest.

The lucky part is that my mom is in town, so she has been able to give the boys fun outings and happy food and cool books and hair cuts and big happy Mamo’ is awesome time.

Lithrotripsicoitallistohectagram is scheduled for this week, which is the procedure where they yell obsceneties into your abdomen until the sound waves cause the kidney stone to shatter. Somehow this causes nothing else to shatter? It makes little sense to me but the nice man who wrote me the prescription I needed says it will help, so we are going to go for it. On Graham’s birthday!

We have yet to have a tooth make it all the way from this child’s mouth to the underpillow place where the magic happens. First he loses the tooth, and then almost right away he loses the lost tooth. And then he starts crying, completely loses it over losing his lose tooth.

Well this time it wasn’t his fault. The tooth was a freak. Noooooo I donnn’t wannnt to fall out! The kid ate apples and crunchy everything and twisted and messed with it and — nothing. It was going to be there forever, we decided until at last tonight it was defeated by a soft bean burrito. His mouth was still full when he realized it was gone, and he couldn’t find the tooth.

I’m not going to tell you what happened next because I like you. See how I’ve matured? Years ago there would have been drawings to go with this and/or detailed description. Instead I’m going to show you a picture of something happy.

So after that we had clearly tried everything possible to find it, and Kevin had finally made up for the thousands of explosive Graham diapers that he sidestepped over those first couple of years by working nights. We assured Nicolaus that the Tooth Fairy is very reasonable, and would completely understand about burritos and teeth and would probably accept a note that explained what happened instead of the actual tooth.

Nicolaus tells people that he’s 90% sure the tooth fairy is Kevin. I don’t know why he would think that. Kevin has more facial hair than a typically depicted mythical fairy and he almost never dances around wearing pink satin tutus and he sings “Teeth! Teeth! All the teeth for me!” in a dainty little voice anymore. But we won’t confirm or deny, we just obnoxiously sidestep the question. He’s torn here. He likes to figure things out and he likes to be RIGHT. But he also really wants the money that the tooth fairy allegedly brings, not that he would know seeing as he always loses his teeth but he has HEARD that there is money and maybe other treasures as well and so he cannot bring himself to risk blowing a chance to get some money. Plus there is that tiny chance… what if she IS real and he hurts her feelings? Can you ever recover from a faux pas like that? And does the tooth fairy flag his name so that other magical gift-bearing trespassers such as Santa/Easter bunny/Grandparents all decide that he’s not worth the hassle?

So. He hates writing, but before bed he wrote a note. Dear Tooth Fairy, I lost my tooth at a restaurant. Do I still get the thing? Please leave a note even if the answer is no. And what do you do with all the teeth? Thank you, Nicolaus

Except he spelled stuff weird but those were the words. He decorated it and slid it under his pillow. He was so excited that he didn’t fall asleep until almost one oclock in the morning oh my god, dude. The tooth fairy has another kid who woke her up this morning at 7:30. So now it’s 1:50 and I think he’s finally solidly asleep enough that I can go in there and… you know. Make sure the tooth fairy has done her job.

WINK.

For a little while at least, I’m going to give in to the quietness in two ways:
1. Tonight I’m going to create a page where I’ll house all kinds of neato school related stuff, broken down by subject. You’ll be able to toss in any ideas or books, movies, links etc.

2. Here on the main page, fewer words. More sketches and photos.

For example, here are some puppies.

I am feeling quiet here lately. As Nicolaus gets older it seems less okay to post hilarious anecdotes about him. But let me tell you, they are hilarious. He is every bit the same kid I quoted here five years ago: always hard at work on something, silly, serious, kinetic, full of words, but now just like those robots always do he has become self aware. He now gets embarrassed about things that never would have fazed him before. Isn’t that cute! Oh my god! My baby is becoming such a little man!! Ooojeewoojeeewoo. So you know, I feel weird posting about his hilariousness unless he’s okay with it. I can tell you that his two front teeth have been loose for a freakishly long time. He finally agreed to let us pull the loosest one and we were so relieved. But then! we failed. We couldn’t get it to come out.

In the meantime, Graham and I were married in a simple ceremony. We celebrated with invisible cake and wooden pizza. He told me that he had to be the bride because he is the beautiful one. I protested that hey, I’m kind of beautiful! So he clarified: “Mama. Look at us. You are beautiful but I mean whichever one is the MOST beautiful, that one has to be the bride.”

He’s not wrong but still. Stings.

What else can I tell you? We are nerding it up like crazy over here. I keep trying to build anticipation and be clever and coy about what Kevin’s been working on but it turns out I probably don’t have the patience to sustain that. But for now just trust me. The thing with the stuff is awesome.

We formed a real live LLC which is simple to do but makes us sound very grownuppish. Oh and! The new edition of the baby book will be ready in a couple of weeks. It’s mostly the same but I am very excited about this one because it works for single moms, adoptive parents, parents who went through infertility treatment, gay couples, straight couples, and people who assemble their baby using things they found laying around.

Other than that we’re working on new prints, homeschooling, and training our dog not to be a jerk.