Some small business matters:
1. Do you do this face booking thing? I am using it to give out updates on Nerdy Baby news and products and stuff. Seems less intrusive than any kind of email marketing, but still lets people know what we’re up to. Which! You need to know because what we are up to is being awesome. So if you are into that sort of thing, here is a link for it:
Nerdy Baby facebook page woooooo!

My understanding is that if you LIKE it (as opposed to just liking it) then you’ll see what we’re up to in your news feed. It’s a little confusing to me the way it’s connected to my regular account which is mainly for whatever regular facebook accounts are for, but I am tired of waiting until the magical moment when I understand it all. So! Facebook ahoy!

2. There is a Nerdy Baby iphone app. Should I use an exclamation point there? It’s exciting. App! Yes, that exclamation point felt nice. App app! Nerdy Baby App! It’s a simple flashcard app but it’s MY simple flashcard app and so it’s got some silliness mixed in.

So! When you have a minute, turn on your phone or steal someone else’s phone, then go to the app store and search for “Nerdy Baby” and you will find it. And then you will buy it and download it and use the flashcards to teach your baby all of the important things that babies need to know, like the fact that you love them enough to let them mess around with your phone.

3. More and more, Kevin is being sent to the basement to work. And that is a wonderful thing. Over Christmas UncommonGoods asked him to please design some NerdyBaby ™ cufflinks, and so he did. And while he was at it he came up with a pair of earrings and another necklace that might be fun to produce later on. We shipped off the samples, expecting them to choose one or two possibilities and then to enter into rounds of design changes and discussions about whether or not fertilization is a suitable subject for a piece of jewelry. Instead, the instant response I got from the buyer was: We love it. All of it. We want it all. How many can you produce in time for Father’s Day?

Holy Gordon-Ramsay’s-word-for-hello.

Now Kevin is busy busy busy, and it’s so good to see him making things again. A year ago he didn’t have a place to set up his studio, didn’t see any immediate future in metalsmithing, was disheartened over wasting his degree. And now he’s not only set up to make things, but he’s kicking booty at it and making money to help us pay down our debts.

4. And I haven’t even gotten to the new toys and puzzles and things which have me jumping up and down I can’t wait until I have it all ready so I can show you.

5. These were going to be just a few quick notes before I got on to the real post (mostly about Graham), but now I went on too long and I’m sleepy and I ate half a can of lightly salted cashews and feel gross. So! Sleep now. More soon. I was going to say tomorrow but I’m learning not to promise specific timeframes because my brain lies to me whenever I ask it about when something is going to happen.

Whenever my kids have had a birthday, people have said oh my gosh can you BELIEVE it’s been a year? Or three years? Or whatever the right number of years was. And I always said actually, not to be a smartass but yeah I can believe it. I’m not good about calendars but it seems like it’s been exactly that many number of years. And then the person says why do I even bother talking to you?

But last week Nicolaus had a birthday and then he became a kid who is eight years old. EIGHT. No one has asked me “Can you believe it’s been EIGHT years??” but if they did I would say “NO. No I can’t. There’s no way he can really be this old because eight is practically TEN and that’s practically twelve and I am going to pass out.”

There’s this sudden realization that every old woman who ever warned me to treasure every moment because they grow so fast, my god those old women were right. Not that I argued with them or didn’t treasure — okay potty training was horrible — but I DID try to treasure at least 70 – 85% of all the moments. Maybe more? But it turns out after all of that treasuring work, I was sorely misled. Treasuring the moments does nothing to slow down their growth. I don’t understand. Having a camera ready at all times and savoring every wonderful conversation was supposed to put life in slow motion.

So new parents, I’ll be the only one out there who will tell you the God’s honest truth: if you have a little baby, go ahead and treasure every moment if you want to but fair warning: it won’t stop you from waking up tomorrow and having him suddenly be old enough to sign up for an archery class with actual arrows that could really stab and kill someone right in the heart or throat or something and you’ll be standing there with one hand weighed down with your Nikon all ready to take pictures and you’ll think WAIT A CUSSWORDING MINUTE. When did they start letting little babies sign up for shit like this?

Then you’ll have a minor freakout moment where your reality and actual reality combine and you realize sheepishly that you owe the people at Gymboree a letter of apology for your many complaints about the sizing on their onesies.

Then you’ll buy your suddenly-eight-year-old a mango cake from a bakery and get in the car to go and see the Parthenon.

Which will be wildly coincidental because that’s totally what WE did when ours turned eight!

The Parthenon was supposed to be a surprise but I was talking to my mom on the phone and didn’t realize he was in the room. It’s not my fault. He wasn’t talking. How was I supposed to know he was in range? That’s a new thing this eight-to-twelve year old does: have quiet days. It’s not every day; in fact yesterday I was relieved to hear him pacing around the room rapidly adding layers to an imaginary scenario, this same mode he’s gone into since he was 18 months old where he’s talking to no one but is eagerly sharing the crazy things he is pretending right now. Ah, I will miss the pacing and talking mode if he ever outgrows it entirely.

But now there are just as many days where he doesn’t pace or talk quickly. He sits, curled up in a blanket and thinks things without saying them out loud.

I don’t mean to harrass him but I can’t help it. Are you okay? You feeling alright? I honest to goodness reached across the couch yesterday to push my palm under his long bangs to feel his forehead. No fever. I caught myself too late and you’ll be interested to know that kids do not learn exasperated eye rolling from public schools. It’s possible that he learned it from yoga or chess club or an art class, but my guess is it’s an innate response to obnoxious parenting. But in my defense! this is the kid who didn’t stop talking even when he had laryngitis.

So. He has newfound powers of stealth, and he accidentally used them to find out that we were taking him to Nashville to see the ancient temple of his favorite goddess, Athena. Kevin says that now that there are two Parthenons in the world, nobody should say that they went to see “the Parthenon” in Greece. They saw A parthenon.

But even with the main surprise well spoiled, we planned out a heck of a trip. In four days we stayed one night in a beautiful cabin, explored an old-timey general store, drove up to Nashville, took Beezus to dog daycare, got lost, found the Parthenon, grossly misjudged the weather, totally blew our children’s minds with an enormous statue of Athena, stomped around the museum, broke Graham’s heart at the gift shop, picked up the dog, went to Chattanooga. Stayed at the ChooChoo hotel. Explored nearly every tourist trap that Chattanooga has to offer. Children’s museum. Ruby Falls. Rock City. Oh my god, have you ever been to Chattanooga? Have you seen Rock City? Oh my holy heck. That’s all I can say. A beautiful place made by crazy people, for crazy people. Anyway we were go go go, drive drive drive, congratulations, child! Now you are eight.

I want to physically feel better. I would say that it’s depression or good old-fashioned lazy except that I have huge amounts energy and motivation — I can do anything in the world! I will work endlessly and nothing can stop me! I will conquer the kingdom of Greece and name it after Tiffany the Great! As long as I can do it while sitting.

This isn’t new; on the playground I was the kid who sat on the concrete wall and drew dogs. If I had to play, my picks were the swings or maybe the spin-around thing where you sit and some other sucker runs around and gets it going.

But it’s more than just a distaste for using my muscles to do things, I enjoy going for walks and dancing to good music and running around chasing the kids pretending to be a monster because hahaha. But physical annoyances slow me down. My gluten-free magical cure is failing, making me wonder whether the improvement was a glorious 2-year-long placebo effect. So my stupid digestive system cycles me through a series of punishments, leaving me feeling achy and exhausted. I told one doctor that it feels like a small truck had been driving all around my insides. He thought that was amusing. “I’ve never heard it described that way before.”

Points for originality! But no suggestions on how to live a happy existence in a physical human body.

I also have super happy fun girl times that are bad enough to take down an elephant. What does that even mean? Well my last cycle started January 15 and ended in early February so it means that even fancy, super tough creatures like elephants would eventually park themselves on the couch because this is just ridiculous.

And! I recently realized that I should see a doctor about my right foot. It hurts. Maybe they can fix that? It’s something I’ve gradually accommodated for so many years that it didn’t dawn on me that pain is not normal until a few weeks ago. A friend has taken up running and I’ve been so impressed with her progress because just the thought of running down the block makes me cringe. How does she do it without exploding with pain? About the 50th time I had this thought I went wait a minute… I’ll bet HER foot doesn’t hurt when she runs. That’s cheating!

The final clue that something isn’t right was when I caught myself envying a lady in a wheelchair. I’ll bet nobody faults HER for sitting down all day. If I had a wheelchair I could act like gosh I do SO want to get up and run around but you know… this darn wheelchair… and people would see how much mental energy I have and how much I get done and they would be super impressed with me. And they would think wow, if only Tiffany could walk I’ll be she could take over the world!

Before you yell at me for being insensitive to people who can’t walk, my whole point is that I realize this isn’t normal. I am going to start seeing doctors about it right away. In fact I can make the appointments right now! While I sit here at the dining room table! And if the diagnosis is Crybaby Lazy-bottom-and-foot Disease then I will just have to… I don’t know. Do they have therapy for that? Or some kind of illegal street drug? OR instead of acquiring physical energy, maybe there’s something I could do to make myself be okay with this permanent state of lameness? I had a roommate once who drank huge amounts of vodka; the lucky duck rarely left her bed and it didn’t seem to bother her at all.

But! But but but but but wait! I promised a dog update. And I always eventually do what I promise I’ll do.

So! We were 90% sure that Gracie was going to work, but wanted to meet more dogs just to make sure because I will seriously fall in love like an idiot with any dog I meet and the whole point here was to make me not be an idiot. A few days later we met a small 30-pound lab mix, less than a year old, still very much a puppy. A puppy wasn’t what we were looking for but they sent her to meet us because she likes kids so much. And wow. Turns out that sometimes Kevin and I are both idiots; we fell in love with her immediately. Graham ranked her above Gracie (still placing both far above me, which is fair I think). Her foster keeper lady agreed to let us keep her for just a few days to see how it might work out.

And yeah. It worked out. She rules.

Graham poses certain challenges when it comes to dogs. He’s not mean or aggressive. He’s just very excited about being alive and not afraid to jump up and down and shout about it. On the couch. Next to a sleeping dog. Anyway. My point is, I think we may have found a winner.

She doesn’t just tolerate him. She seeks him out and flops down and falls asleep while he drives cars down her spine or whispers noisy secrets into her soft ears.

Graham was THE reason we went on a mission to find a stable, non-nervous beast to live with us. But I have to say, she is an upgrade in so many bonus ways. I never realized how much energy I was devoting to working around our other dogs’ nervousness. In public I had to keep Roux from going crazy growling and barking at other dogs, and had to stop people from petting him because no matter how many ways I warned them they would touch the top of his head and he would try to bite them. After two years of socialization the best we achieved was a steady state of him waiting for us to go the hell home where it was safe. This dog LOVES to go places. She meets new people and hey! Hi! I know how to sit on command! We are friends now, right? Would you like me to lick you on the mouth because I can do that for you if you would like! No? Okay, I’ll sit and wag my tail because this has been just fantastic meeting you.

I’ve also never owned a dog who would just go to the bathroom. Based on Mouse and Roux, I thought that peeing outside must be a very dangerous thing for dogs to do in the wild. Always alert. What was that? A leaf rustling? Oh my god! Is it safe? A dog barked in the distance. A stranger walked by. Another stranger with a dog and a leaf blower might exist somewhere. Wait wait, let’s think about this. It’s very cold out here. Could we maybe just go back inside? I can pee in there, and you’ll be mad but you won’t kill me. I’m pretty sure the scary things out here will kill me if I pee.

This dog trots outside, sniffs around and pees. It can be cold. It can be raining. It can be scary. She’ll notice that it’s scary, then decide you know what, screw it. I gotta go. Then she plays with sticks for a few minutes and trots back and sits politely by the back door. I would never give up on a dog over taking half an hour to go to the bathroom but wow. I love her.

When the UPS man arrived, Mouse used to hide under a table and then throw up and then maybe have a seizure. Roux would shake and bark and bark and bark and bark bark bark bark bark bark go away UPS man! We don’t want you here! And yes, I did try having the UPS man give him treats. Roux peed on the floor, took the treat, dropped it, and went back to barking. Every time.

This dog looks to see who is at the door. Wags. Watches. Done. Everything is like that. There’s just this basic trust in her brain that everything is okay, somebody has this all under control. Not bad for a beast that’s been shuffled between who knows where, the pound, a foster, and now here.

The only things we are working on are walking on the leash like a regular dog and not being so mouthy. She loves us and wants to chew on our hands because how else will we know about the love?? Any hints on how to discourage that?

That and she is at least half retriever. She brings me things from around the house all day long. The boys panic when she has their stuffed toys in her mouth, but she hasn’t torn anything up. She just walks in the living room with a toy in her mouth and a look on her face like “Um. I don’t know why I’m holding this. Do you want it?”

Anyway, yay dog. She’s awesome. She loves Kevin, she gazes at him like ohhh my man is ever so dreamy.

What’s her name? Well we aren’t totally settled yet. My idea was Artemis. Kevin suggested Cornflake. The boys are calling her Beezus, and they are probably right.

Well, see, I’ve been stressed. Confronting failures and trying to be less bad at the seventeen things I’m bad at, which doesn’t sound like a lot but they’re pretty general things. It’s not like “bad at making pesto” and “bad at letting fingernails dry without smudging them” — no, those would be very nicely specific shortcomings which could be overlooked because wow, less than 20? Pretty great. But mine are more like “bad at anticipating things that take place at the same time every day” or “bad at having the patience to do things right the first time.”

So anyway. I’m not normally one to walk around hitting myself with a stick but damn it if all of my most annoying flaws didn’t all converge over the first part of last week. What do you think I did? I cried a lot. And then I foisted long, exhausting talks upon my husband. And then I pulled it together, adopted a laborador retriever puppy, and began an intensive reading bootcamp for my second grader who we had tested at a local tutoring facility. They told us that he reads on a kindergarten level and would need hundreds and hundreds of hours to catch up.

Which FREAKED us out. What? How? How can he suck that bad at reading? We used to be reading teachers! We knew he was struggling but it didn’t seem that bad. We just expected them to help target his weak areas and shore him up a little.

But we felt better when we realized that first of all, when she started going over the results the tutor mentioned that kindergarten is the new second grade, so what they really meant was that he is reading on a second grade level but our state wants second graders to be reading on a fourth grade level so he is behind. This might be a relevant place to mention that Atlanta schools could lose accreditation if they can’t get teachers to stop cheating on their students’ standardized tests. So perhaps it’s okay for a second grader to read at a second grade level?

We also realized that any tutoring place that heavily emphasizes their financing options might not be incented to report that your child could improve readily with more practice.

But still. It set us into a panic. We don’t want to burn him out but we would like to help him push past the s-o-u-n-ding out stage because at that point reading is going to become a whole lot more fun for him. This means for the next couple of weeks we are setting aside a lot of our fun history and science studies and focusing on all reading, all the time. In the meantime, it hit me hard. I walked around absorbing my failure for several days. I didn’t teach my son how to read. It was my job and I messed it up. He can build a circuit, he can make an electromagnet and a tiny motor. He uses metaphor and literary allusion. He is right this second drawing an elaborate phoenix. But he can’t cusswording read, and that’s my fault.

I can’t find it now but I swear I posted at some point that if anyone ever tried to give me a laborador puppy I would call the police and file a restraining order for threatening to do me harm. That was a joke to illustrate just how much I don’t like crazy jumping frisbee dogs. Haha get it? I’m prejudiced!

But we started researching breeds, determined for once that we wouldn’t screw this decision up. We were going to be open to any breed, any mix, anything that could deal with noisy spinning jabbery kids. Not that I know any kids who are jabbery, but just in case we ever meet any it would be good to have a dog that wasn’t bothered by that.

Let me back up. We found a home for Roux. He is living in a little pack of little similar mixed-breed dogs, and he is having all kinds of fun. Oh guilty! I felt so, so guilty leaving him there. The first day he escaped from the woman and took off, presumably to find me and oh my goodness, the guilt. But then he realized that life at her house is WAY more fun, and he went back to her front porch and waited for her to come home from her frantic search of the neighborhood. Homeward Bound, alternate ending.

She has been texting me updates and pictures and CLEARLY this is a dog that needed to live with other little dogs to play with. So I felt good because he is in a happy place with a lady who is happy to have him in her well-cared-for yappy pack. But I also felt sad because it turns out that I need a dog in my life or I go crazy and sad. But it also turns out I am very bad at choosing dogs with calm, stable personalities.

THIS time I won’t screw up, THIS time I won’t screw up…

So. Once Mr.Roux was all settled in his new and improved small dog haven, we started researching breeds. And I became obsessed with Petfinder. NOT the way for us to choose a pet because I am an idiot who will fall in love with a pointy little nervous dog who has a tragic story and needs lots of work on his issues. No no no. This is work that I’m not qualified to do. I’m good at training a dog to do cute tricks like “bang!” play dead!

I’m not good at “bang! don’t have a seizure every time we have company over!” or “BANG, Trust people who have beards!” or “Bang! don’t growl at people who move a certain way!” or “Bang! Don’t bite children!”

We held family meetings and talked about what do we want from a dog. What do we NEED. What breeds have those things? Determined to be rational about this, we started talking to local rescue groups. I told them I need a dog that is unfazed by noisy children, a go-anywhere dog that takes everything in stride. I don’t care if it looks like a cross between an antelope and a catfish, it just needs to be stable and friendly and not a candidate for intensive therapy of any sort.

This process landed us at the Atlanta Lab Rescue. Which is funny because neither of us have met very many labs that we liked. Labs tend to be the crazy unruly dogs that are off-leash with an owner a quarter mile away. These are the dogs that bound toward you and try to knock you down with giant muddy paws while the owner shouts “HE’S FRIENDLY!!”
We once had a huge black lab jump into our car and grab a snack out of my screaming toddler’s hand while his owner called across the busy parking lot “IT’S OKAY!! HE’S JUST SAYING HI!”

So maybe it turns out that what I don’t like is lab owners.

But the Atlanta Lab Rescue people, oh man. They are amazing. After a detailed interview the director said “We have three that I think you should meet. They’re what I call bulletproof when it comes to new people, new dogs, kids, nothing really gets to them.”

We met the first one a few days later and oh my gosh what a sweet and mellow girl. The quietest, easiest, closest thing to an oversized stuffed animal you can imagine. Four year old chocolate lab named Gracie. Right away the kids decided that she was the greatest dog on earth. Graham added her to his list of favorite people, and then placed her a mile above me. ME. The person who he believes wakes up early every morning to roll out tiny little donut-shaped cereal before baking it in the oven so he can have Cheerios for breakfast.

We were pretty sure we’d end up with this dog, based on the pantomime hugs and kisses that Graham gave to invisible Gracie at bedtime.

There’s more to write, more about dogs with pictures. Did we adopt Gracie? TUNE IN TOMORROW TO FIND OUT. And there’s bonus thoughts about cheesecake and British people and recurring dreams and… oh right, and Hoarders! But right now my brain is turning out the lights, and in thirty seconds I’m going to be asleep.