Years and years ago, Kevin and I went through this phase of wanting to be art teachers. It was foolish nonsense of course, we could never be teachers without ending up on the news for what we said to the administrators. But some of the classes we took were good. It was the mid-90s political correctness era and our professor warned us a million times to avoid what she called “that lousy tacos and eggrolls approach” to teaching kids about other cultures. Meaning that unless you give art projects meaning and context, you’re doing little more than stereotyping and trivializing those cultures.

Last week we studied ancient China and with no prompting from their learned teacher, my children launched themselves head-on into that lousy tacos and eggrolls approach. They copied random characters onto popsicle sticks and declared the sticks Oracle Bones. They made little kites, made dragon dance costumes with moving mouths and eyes out of taped-together old flashcards. They made their own shadow puppets, made fans, and gave Kevin and I many many red envelopes with little construction-paper Chinese coins. They ate rice with chopsticks, which is easy for Nicolaus and hard for everyone else, they tried seaweed snacks, they basically did every single thing that my professor would have hated. They did most of this with little or no prompting, and they were so excited about it all that I felt great about the week.

But I got an A in that class! It’s all wrong! But the thing is, where were they getting these ideas? From what we were learning, right? And while the boys cut and painted and pasted and tried to tie popsicle sticks together, I walked around behind them reading and talking about the history of China. I talked about different systems of ethics. I talked about empires and dynasties, even though I greatly simplified it because goodness sakes. I got them to draw the mountains, the deserts, the major rivers. We talked about the wall, the underground tombs and the terra cotta army and the crazy MFer who started those things. We read about the origins of major holidays, the Chinese creation myth, ancestor worship. How much of the historical context went into their busy, lousy eggroll craft-doing little brains? I’m not sure. But today Nicolaus announced that he is more of a Taoist than a Confuscist. And Graham told me he is going to climb Mount Everest and see the ancient tombs and the forbidden city just as soon as we buy him a ticket to China. “Even though,” he sighed, “We’ll have to go to modern China.”

Neither of them want to see the wall. They think the wall is terrible.

We also read a zillion stories together and listened to The Five Chinese Brothers. I made a Pandora channel called Traditional Chinese Folk Music, and we talked about what kinds of imagery the songs made us think of. We read the story of Mulan and watched the movie. Then we read the story again and talked about what kinds of things they change to make something into a modern movie.

We were going to talk about India next but thanks to NPR and an unfortunate Netflix viewing of 3 Ninjas, my kids are now insisting on learning everything about Japan. So here I am awake late at night trying to put together some basic idea of what we’ll do all week. Since we’re on the heels of learning about Chinese I’ll probably rely heavily on compare/contrast. I don’t have any good books on Japan and our awesome world history book had to be thrown out because of the sour milk event. Luckily there’s Wikipedia and Mr.Donn’s history pages and Brain Pop and man, how did anyone ever teach anything before the internet?

One of my imaginary books I have written is called Succeeding In Life Without ADHD Medication, in the Sense that Finding My Phone, Wallet, and Keys all at the Same Time Counts as Success. On Monday I lost my keys. I looked everywhere, I dug through my purse and emptied it out because I swear they were in here and oh my gosh it complicated everything because we recently changed the locks and so now I had a spare car key but not a spare house key so if I went anywhere it was a matter of locking the house from inside and then unlocking the door from the house to the garage from the inside and then later using the garage door opener to get back in the house, which wouldn’t be a big deal if we had a clean garage like rich people, but our garage is full of mostly stuff that’s going to goodwill or recycling, plus an extra washer and dryer someone gave us in case ours ever break. Getting into the house meant climbing over cardboard and old furniture and oh no should I really get rid of the boys’ little toy piano? My parents gave it to them and the boys played it so much when they were little but now they’ve grown and it takes up space, but oh oh guilt over giving it to goodwill! And that’s the path to getting in the house without a house key. Really frustrating when I got the boys loaded in the car and realized I’d forgotten something important and needed to run back in real quick.

I am trying not to suck at housekeeping. Every week I spend a few hours clearing things out of here that we don’t need, organizing what we keep, and then dusting and arranging and fussing over making some corner of our little house look nice. My pretend goal that’s keeping me motivated is the dream that we could be featured on ApartmentTherapy.com someday. The home tour would be called Tiffany and Kevin’s Series of Half-assed Efforts and Marital Compromises and people would say things like “LOVE THIS!” and “WOW, it’s so hard to be minimalist with children, but they really pulled it off!” and “Cheerful, warm, simply amazing.” and “PLEASE tell me where you got that lamp.” And I’ll coyly say oh that old thing? We made that ourselves. And then everyone on the site will want one, and they’ll be willing to pay like $800 for lamps because everyone on ApartmentTherapy is rich and from what I understand the way to get rich is to spend money on things like fancy makeup and $800 bedside table lamps and park inside a clean garage.

So I’m cleaning and decorating and it’s overwhelming and will never be finished but still. This happens every few years. The challenges here are:
1. This is not our house
2. We don’t want to paint
3. The owner of the house is very nice, but he and I have opposite taste in paint colors. He wrongly likes putty, navy, gray and medium brown. I like correct colors like turquoise, pink, green, orange, and yellow.
4. Budget = almost nothing
5. Time to work on home decor = almost none

So what I do is snap a phone picture of a room and then open the picture in photoshop. I start erasing clutter and things that bother me until I see oh! Here’s where this needs to go! Then I rearrange the physical room and snap another crummy blurry phone picture. Back into photoshop where I spend ten minutes or so adding things in until it looks nice. Then I save it and close it and try to think of what we already have that would go in those places. Need new curtains to match the blue… oh wait! I have some IKEA sheers from my old studio! Need some framed artwork there. Hm. Hey how about this mirror that’s been propped against the wall in the dining room? Hey would THIS blanket work? No. How about…

And on and on, until finally I realize that some things will HAVE to be purchased at an actual store.

That’s a whole other area of stress because I hate spending money on house stuff. Don’t know why. Things always seem overpriced or crummy quality and in general I want to be surrounded by things that make me feel happy and light, not guilty and weighed down. Why do sheets and pillows cost so much? We as a species can produce and sell a plastic miniature fan with batteries and a motor and foam blades attached to a squirt bottle for 88 cents, but a hemmed piece of cotton fabric is $40. Which would be okay with me if the people growing the cotton or weaving the cloth or printing it or sewing it were the ones making most of that $40, but they aren’t. Someone is paying $1 for these sets and re-selling them for crazy amounts of money. I tried shouting out, “$30 for a pillow? It’s a scam! The emperor has no clothes!” in Bed, Bath, and/or Beyond yesterday but no one cared. So I grabbed a set of organic Amy Butler sheets that were on clearance and walked around for 45 minutes debating. Organic! Good for the environment. Made in China! Bad for human rights and everything else. $50 on clearance is still a lot of money! But sheets cost a lot, even at Walmart or Target and those suck. And these are pretty. But $50 oh oh oh, Kevin has to stand on his feet for a long time to make $50. But we need sheets. Ohhhhhh I don’t knowwwwww. Finally I texted Kevin my dilemma. He wrote back and said “Get the good sheets. Then come home and rub my feet.”

So I did and they (edit for clarity: the sheets) are so pretty! Really tie the room together. They smell weird though, like carpet freshener, so I need to wash them before we really use them.

All of this has been humming in the background while I pack orders, write to people, make a dozen small meals every day, and learn about Ancient China with the kids.

So! The house is slowly looking like we might live here on purpose. And! We are going to fly kites today. And! I found my keys. They were in my purse. And maybe I will hang on to the little piano a little while longer.

Here’s what happens: some part of our daily routine slowly becomes wobbly, and I don’t notice. It wobbles a little more, and I still don’t notice. I just step around it and keep going, or speak up a little over the noise. And keep going. Gradually it becomes an all-over brawl, a complete Marti Gras parade mess of a time and I still don’t notice; I’m just very tense and stressed out for no reason and then Kevin points out that you know, it’s sort of stressful to have this band of 30 trained monkeys coming through here playing Happy Birthday on their crash-symbols during dinner and maybe we should do something about that? Or at least teach them how to play in unison so it really sounds like something?

And finally I realize Oh look at that! Our children need direction on how to eat dinner without making us hate everything! And so I think about what would the Supernanny do? And usually I come up with something like stickers for the kids to stand on, or a checklist or “Let’s play a game. Any time I clap my hands and say Marco! You say Polo! Then I say Shush! And you say nothing for the next hour! and I send Daddy to the store to get some wine.”

Little games and routines and songs AMAZE me every time they work. Do these kids really not know I’m manipulating them? Why does making the rule rhyme make it instantly non-negotiable?

We have checklists for waking up, for going to bed, for getting out the door, and on and on. I only wrote them down for the first few times, after that it’s in their head. This stuff seems like the crazy kind of thing that people in magazines do… crazy, organized, wonderful people who aren’t me. But what I figured out is that if I want to be lazy — and I DO — then putting the time and energy into little systems and checklists and rules makes being lazy so much easier. Perfect since I’m even lazy about being lazy.

Now instead of having to walk behind them like a megaphone-enabled sheep herding dog “Brush your teeth! Go to the bathroom! Don’t forget to flush! Did you get your blanket? Get your drink of water! Oh my god why didn’t you put on your pajamas… Wait, did you brush your teeth??”
I can say “Checklist!” and they run around and do everything while I sit and do nothing except think “this is awesome this is awesome this is awesome” over and over until they are ready for bed.

It is awesome.

Even with the checklist leading up to bedtime, the actual bedtime story part had somehow gotten out of hand. It seems simple, right? I read a book and you listen. But once in awhile they’d say “Can we play a game of chess for our story?”

Well. What kind of jerk parent says no to that? Of course you may, you adorable chess-playing weirdos.

And then it was “Instead of playing chess, can we watch 15 minutes of Jeff Corwin for our story?”

Wellll it’s TV. But it’s educational, mellow TV and maybe it’s *like* a bedtime story if we all pile on the couch together and watch it and think bed timey thoughts?

You see what happened, right, from there it all unraveled into a giant mess where they’d run and do their checklist and then go off the walls insane for 30 minutes or so until I stormed in there like a dinosaur mama, “RAAAAAAR! GO TO BED!!”

And they’d jump into bed and then say “You are the meanest mama that has ever existed so far!!”

And I’d storm in and out of their room feeling frazzled and cranky and just DONE. Sucky. And (duh) not worth the 30 minutes of crazy fun they were having right before bed.

All of this to say that this week I hit the re-set button on bedtime. If they say “Can we develop a cure for cancer instead of our bedtime story?” I stand firm and say “No. I’m going to read stories for bedtime stories.”

Once I’m reading if they say “While I listen to the story, may I get up and pull excaliber out of that stone over there?” I say no, you can become king of all england in the morning, please come and sit in Graham’s bed next to me. They complain, they groan, I’m a big dork with my dorky plain non-playing bedtimes, but then? They give in and it’s wonderful. We pile up, turn the lights down low, read two stories, and oh my goodness what a simple concept. It’s so peaceful. Graham even started requesting lullabies, no joke, actual little lullabies to help him sleep. And now I remember why people invented the idea of lullabies and bedtime stories and tucking in. It’s made a huge difference in the week. I feel stupid for letting it all slip! I was being — as the supernanny lady says — just plain lazayy.

I am such a damned packrat. Thousands of emails, hundreds of saved drafts everywhere, stickies, notes, drawings, ideas, text files, everything everywhere ends up jotted down and then added to the archeological dig. It’s pretty sure genetic; my dad is two years into scanning all of his grandfather’s scrawled little notebooks which aren’t anything like a diary or a series of journals so much as a vast collection of tiny rants, grievances/debts owed to him, and ideas for product advertisement jingles.

Tonight I started jotting something down and decided just to type it here instead because honestly? I can’t find a pen and I’m in bed already and sheesh. Packrat + lazy bum already.

So here’s what I was trying to jot… this is the story Nicolaus told us tonight:

Once there were some young boys who were playing wildly in the house. They were making a lot of noise and were being kind of much too crazy. And so their grandfather called them over to sit with him and he said, “How would you like to hear a tale from my life from long ago? It is the story of a long and perilous journey.”

The boys immediately quieted down and they leaned close to hear the story.

“When I was fifteen years old, I had a job in a paper factory. And one day I was in the office when my boss called me over. He told me that I needed to go and get a cup of coffee for him. And so? I did. The end.”

And his grandsons said, “Wait! How was that a LONG journey?”

The grandfather answered well it was technically short but it SEEMED long as I was walking.

The boys said “But you said it was perilous!”

The man explained to the boys that the coffee was extremely hot. He had to walk very carefully to keep from spilling burning hot coffee on himself and in fact! As he was coming up the stairs a tiny speck DID splash up and landed on his hand. And it hurt pretty bad, just for like a single second.

“Get it? When you tell someone it’s a story of a long and dangerous journey they imagine it’s going to be ships lost in the ocean with storms or intense fights or dangers! And it completely wasn’t. And it’s also funny to – I like when my stories are like a story but the story is ABOUT another story, don’t you think that’s really funny?”

I resisted the temptation to lecture him about Hamlet, and he laughed like a maniac until I made him get into bed.