Sometimes I get a little nervous about what my kids do and don’t understand…
“Oh whoops. I didn’t realize that meant subtract. So all of these… I think I added all of them.”

…then I get worried…
“I can’t. I can’t read any of this.” (looking at something he could read just two days ago)

…then I get optimistic, but maybe a little confused? but mostly optimistic…
“Okay well I know there are forty there because… well I knew that two plus two is four. And tens… are kind of like a two. Okay? And hundreds are like a three. That’s just what I consider… anyway. That doesn’t matter. But five plus five is ten and so there’s twenty here and twenty over there and if two plus two is four, then two tens plus two tens has to be forty.”

…then I get excited.
“I have a question. It’s kind of a big question. Okay? The question is WHY NOW. And! Actually, I think that would be a really good name for a book: WHY NOW? And the book would be about why does everything happen right when it happens. WHY does it happen NOW? Why not sooner? Why doesn’t it happen later on? Does it HAVE to happen that way? And the book would be all about… all about that.”

or…
“What IF. Okay they really should try this, like scientists should seriously find out if this is possible. But you’d want to try it with rats or something like that first just in case it didn’t work out… you know. So. What they should DO is find out if you can somehow take the special egg cell out of a lady and put it together with a… a… what’s it called again? The boy cell. And SEE if you can put them together and then grow a baby like in a… a somebody else or another mammal or even like someTHING else besides the original mother. Wouldn’t that be SO COOL??”

And same with Graham. I get nervous…
“Wait, which letter is P again?”

and then I get worried…
“I forgot what I was supposed to be doing. A lot of times I just instantly can’t remember things.”

…and then I start to feel optimistic…
“I have to have an even number of robots! Because I have two of each color, except I lost one of the black ones. So that would mean an odd number BUT NOW I can’t find one of the yellow ones so… so so that means it’s even. I don’t need to count them.”

…and then I jump up and down and flap my arms like a big happy weenie.
\”You know how the alphabet is all the letters in our language? Well maybe because people know that, maybe they think that a rainbow is like the alphabet of colors, like they think oh, that must be all of the colors that people can see. And is that funny because what about black? And white? And SILVER. Gold. And brown. And darker brown and bright brown… none of that is in a rainbow. Even though yellow is. And other colors that can be mixed. But you still can’t mix silver, right? Hahaha that’s so funny.”

“Is there something that’s like a mirage but with sound? Like is it possible to HEAR things that aren’t really there?”

I don’t know what you call that kind of thinking, these connective thoughts and pieces all being strung back and forth all day long. Is it metaphor? Abstract thinking? Is this what we would all be like if we didn’t have jobs to go to and could spend the day walking around thinking about everything we’ve learned and how it might relate to everything else we’ve learned?

I wrote this a week ago but fell asleep before clicking Post. Just found it saved as a draft:

I’m one glass of wine away from going in there and cutting off all of my hair. I’ve been googling “cute short hair” for an hour and came across all manner of cute adorable pictures and youtube instructional videos and oh man. I’m so impatient. Must cut the hair now now now now.

But then I get nervous. I already drive a car that came with smooshed-up teddy grahams ground into the floorboard as a standard feature. Will short hair tell the world that I am:
A) Hip and ready to rock and/or roll
B) Professional and ready to negotiate
C) Middle aged
D) A frumpy mom who wants to blend in
E) A frumpy mom who tries too hard to look hip

Do you see that I can’t win? So in a fit of paranoia about how my new hairstyle will be perceived I did a search for “mom hair” just to see if any of the image results would look like the super cute styles I’ve picked out. And do you know what came up on the first page of Google’s image results?

A blog post from this very blog where I was annoyed by this very same issue, including a little sketch which I’d forgotten all about but ha! My now self agrees with my old self. Can’t win. Going to cut it off. Because regardless of how it looks it should
A) feel awesome to have hair off of my neck without the weight of pigtails or braids
B) be a drastic change, which is always funny
C) make it easier for me to wear wigs/disguises, perform complex heists involving betrayal and deceit
D) be much easier to wash, dry, and go
E) grow back quickly because it always does
F) horrify my children, which will be funny
G) help me to stop getting my swearword strands of hair stuck in the tape on all of the packages I’m mailing out. If you’ve ordered from me before, you received unintended samples of my hair which I hope you will have the courtesy to not use for DNA extraction/cloning purposes and/or voodoo doll construction.

—
So I didn’t drink the wine and I didn’t cut my hair. Instead, I paid someone else to cut it for me. She said “So what are we doing?” and I said “I’m ready to cut it all off. Make it as short as a boy’s hair, but feminine enough that if a boy had my haircut people would make fun of him because it looks girly.”

Then I showed her pictures of cute haircuts on people with hair that is fine and straight. She smiled sympathetically because yeah, no. My hair is thick and wavy and just — no. So I gave up on the pictures and said, “I just want really short hair. I’ve damaged it and it’s time to start all over. But! I don’t want to be puffy. And I’m not trying to look all professional. Or bitchy. Or like I have mom hair. Or like I’m trying to be 17. Just go as short as you can and have it be a girl’s cut. Okay?”

To me this made perfect sense but in hindsight I don’t think this is the best way to describe what you want to a hair cutter lady. I have no idea what to call the hair cut that I ended up with. It feels great. It looks… well, there aren’t that many mirrors in the house so this is mostly not an issue. Some days I love it but every day it looks completely different depending on what? The weather maybe? Today it was a crazy party up there, half-eaten curls sticking up and around. Headband was needed to keep things from getting out of hand. Other days it dries into this understated grownuppish hair do. I don’t know. Current plan is to grow it out for a few weeks and then go to someone else who will understand my inarticulate vision. In the meantime, emergency cute hairclips and possibly pink highlights are in immediate order.

Alright so! As I was saying. Sometimes the worksheets are too tedious to put together, or the idea needs more pictures than my poor cheap little inkjet can deal with. So I do what every loving mother does: I make a powerpoint.

Look, I worked in marketing and my job for a long time was to make stuff for salespeople to use. You don’t have to tell me that powerpoint is one of the devil’s tools. Especially in the hands of a manic account manager who thinks people want every single word they are going to say for the next hour and a half to be written in bold italics up on a screen, or the CEO who needs to stir the hearts and minds of her employees and wants to say it all with clip art. Or the CFO who puts charts and numbers up there that are so crammed with numbers and labels and information in teeny tiny font that oh lord they really should put a lock on that software and only let you save your work if your slides have at least 5% empty space on average.

So why the swearword would I make powerpoint presentations for my kids, when I clearly have suffered trauma at the hands of the MS Office suite?

Because I always secretly enjoyed making slide shows.

And also! Powerpoint is an easy way to organize ideas. My brain holds this giant pile that takes forever to sort through, so what I do is search the internet for pictures related to our theme for the week. Then I dump the pictures into slides and get the boys to help me organize them all. Powerpoint has a view where you can see all of your slides and you can drag and drop them into a different order easy peasy beautiful covergirl. And the boys LOVE IT. They love everything about it, and they absolutely adore watching the show once it’s all put together. Then they want me to print it all out for them just like those sales people always did, so my poor little printer has to pony up and do its job afterall. As an aside, I hate HP. They made this crap printer which gets 20% of the way through the job and blows it off, needs to be re-set every few prints, and won’t turn off unless you unplug it. And you know what? That’s fine. Make a shitty printer. BUT then! They send me cheerful emails every day. Emails and more emails about how wonderful my printer is. Are you deluded? Are you mocking me? Because I really don’t need this. And telling me to “print this coupon for 25% off your next HP purchase!” is not smart. Printing anything on this thing isn’t going to put me in a generous HP-product shopping mood. I’m not kidding you, right now we’re in the middle of a series of daily emails called THE TWELVE DAYS OF HP CHRISTMAS where every morning they send me a special deal because it’s day 5! OMG! It’s like christmas morning!!

And yes, we’ve tried re-installing and updating the drivers and etc etc. It’s a known issue where if you have a mac and use the HP wireless printer as a wireless printer, you’re going to wind up bitter and angry and homeless. The only thing that would make it more annoying would be if HP had negotiated a deal with Apple to give cheap printers away with every Macbook purchase, and then couldn’t support those printers because really haha our drivers don’t work that well with mac.

(**update! Instead of buying ink this week I adopted a Canon color laser that was on sale. On the seventh day of christmas my true love gave to me… a printer that didn’t suck a bottom.)

So teaching. One of my favorite ways to teach is called “These two things are the SAME.” and Powerpoint is perfect for this. I hold up two paintings or two animals or two anything and I try to argue that they’re the same. The boys have to convince me that NO those two couldn’t have been painted by the same person or NO WAY those can’t both be the same kind of animal. They love it because they are argumentative to their very cores and I love it because they notice things I wouldn’t have thought to point out.

Or one from our recent conversations about monkeys:

I was going to go into a lot more detail about how these conversations go but see the boys were preoccupied by a board game — there is that that small window between the time they need me to help them set it up and the time when they are fighting because Graham wanted to winnnnnn and he never gets to win because he’s little and this is not fun oh my god why do we even play board games ever? — and now the window’s over and I wasted it writing unsolicited printer reviews.

HP Photosmart Series Wireless All-in-one inkjet
Editor’s rating:
Pros:
* Affordable.
* Nice quality prints, quiet.
* Includes a scanner and a copy/fax thing.
* When you print on “ink saver” mode it spits out the prints so fast that they quite literally fly across the room and land on the dog’s crate and it freaks him out haha.
* Sleek look, small footprint.

Cons:
* Pouts like a toddler if it runs out of paper.
* Frequently needs to be manually re-set which defeats the purpose (laziness) of having a wireless printer.
* Crashes frequently.
* No on-off button.
* Reports errors that don’t make sense.
* Reports errors on successful prints.
* Prints 20% of a page and then freezes, often refusing to let go of the paper.
* Was designed by bad people with bad souls inside them.

Tonight I was working on sketches for a possible Nerdy Baby board game. Nicolaus saw what I was doing and immediately ran to grab cardstock paper to make a prototype of his own game concept. He worked right up until bedtime, right through my reading of bedtime stories, and took it with him up into his bed to finish while they listened to an audiobook for a little while.

“See how it works is? There’s no dice in this game. You decide how many steps forward your opponent gets to go. It has to be at least four.” Then he held up three little stand-up game pieces, each one a different colored tadpole with a smiley face. “Each player chooses a different daddy cell. And it’s a race. You have to go up this pathway thing and go up and if your guy lands on this special spot it get kind of zooomed ahead over to here…”

Oh! Oh my stars.

“And eventually your pieces gets up here. So this part is where that big kind of like egg cell is? And you kind of transform into another kind of special cell like this and travel through this other tube over to here and get all the way over to this area where the baby grows! And there are different barriers you have to get through in different ways. The goal was going to be to try to be the first one to form a more and more developed human until it’s ready to come out. And that’s how you win! BUT there wasn’t room here so I just made it so you have to get to the mama’s… what’s that place where babies grow?”

I want you to know that I did not giggle or gasp or oh no no no sweetie we can’t at this game even a little. Because he has no idea why it would be an embarrassing topic or funny or inappropriate and I can’t explain it to him without explaining a whole category of things that I’m just not ready for. Plus why should there be any shame in a game about a race to conceive?

My only hesitation about bringing it to market is that the most obvious names are already taken.

This week has been out of focus. It took me two days to realize that oh! This here is a migraine. Sometimes they’re spikey and flourescent and you’d never miss them but sometimes they’re weird and subtle. Like if you had a cat in your house that didn’t belong there, you just kept catching it out of the corner of your eye. You’d be distracted right? Especially if you were allergic to cats and they made your head hurt.

So it’s Wednesday and I know I’ve been a spacey grump with the kids and I know that vandals and ransackers would be better housekeepers but you know what? We will keep going and pretty soon the week will be done and we will have shipped all of our things and decorated our christmas tree and made cookies and made funny jokes and resisted all of the many, many signs that maybe the right answer to the dog problem IS to just give our kids away. We will have played chess and eaten candy canes and brushed our teeth.

Some of us will have been bribed to sleep in our own beds all night, not because our parents don’t love us but because we refuse to sleep under the blanket and when we sleep on TOP of the blanket it’s like having the covers stapled down ca-CHUNK stapled right in the middle so no one can get warm. Others of us will have written paragraphs in future perfect tense using a third person plural narrative voice even though writing that way is incredibly clunky and annoying.

Ah, Graham. He is a typical rock and roller five year old: busy and imaginative and boisterous and laughing one minute and sobbing the next because everyone in the whole world likes everyone else except everyone hates me and hey wow! Look at that bird walking around on the street!

He is stubborn about things we never see coming. He will say things like okay I will put my shoes on but first you HAVE to promise me that you will never make me brush my teeth again because I liked going to get that filling and then getting a prize afterwards. Or he will play chess with you all day long and will cheerfully accept losing every game but you will never be able to take his queen. He has developed a sophisticated counter-attack that he uses to protect his queen called bursting into tears and refusing to play if anyone captures his queen. Hiding her under the couch also works well. That’s the opening move that world-class chess champions use.

He actually is very good at chess for a five year old but — no offense if you are five — that isn’t saying much. In their chess club, Kevin and I watched as three kids argued over who would get to play against Graham, and yeah. Not because he’s so awesome and hard to beat. It was the sickest reversal of playground team sport selection you can imagine. Luckily Graham is sort of unflappable. And when the game is over he runs up to Kevin and I and declares with pride and excitement, “Guess WHAT? There was a CHECK MATE!!”

“Cool!” we say, “So who won?”

“My opponent!” he says cheerfully, and then he rushes back to go have any remaining snot beat out of him in subsequent games. This happens over and over and yet he never stresses over not winning.

So the post sort of wandered into chess and I don’t know how that happened. My head hurts. Today my job is to find a way to be more patient and even with everyone. Including me.