Least reassuring thing a doctor can say: “Oh WOW. That is so, so interesting! I mean, I’m old. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years and I have never seen anything like that. That is really interesting.”

I said thank you. He made it sound like I’d done something great and anyway this was a dermatologist looking at my shins and not, say, a heart doctor trying to figure out how in the hell blood vessels can DO that, but still. So now my doctor is awaiting biopsy results, more out of giddy curiosity than any real concern that something might be wrong. That’s okay with me. I would much prefer a doctor who is fascinated and curious rather than annoyed by not knowing.

That’s not what this post is about, but my biopsy stitches are itching so I thought about it.

This is a post full of pictures. BAD pictures. The quality of the nations’ kid pictures went up – way up – when digital SLRs became something middle class parents could afford, and then they went down – way down – once smart phones became something middle class parents could afford. The big camera is just so big and I’d have to go inside and get it oh but there’s this little crummy one right in my pocket and click! The kids don’t even realizing I’m snapping the photo a lot of times. It’s like spy film. So that’s neat. But the quality sucks.

Still. This is what Nicolaus has been up to lately.

1. He wakes up before anyone else. Then wakes me up because he can’t bear to be alone. While I shuffle around yawning and feeding the dog and other boring things, he entertains himself by A) swiping my iphone and using it to listen to a story whilst B) building something.

On Monday for example, he built this. It’s a model airplane with flaps and a working propeller made from scrap posterboard, electrical tape, a battery and a small motor. The propeller is made out of several layers of posterboard. He had to work to get it to balance right.

2. At some point I wake up enough to begin basic parenting. “Have you been to the bathroom?”

“Oh! I forgot!” and he races off to go pee for ten minutes straight.

3. We have some fruit or a bowl of cereal. I make him read to me until Graham gets up, because I’m mean and I only had kids so I could be mean to kids without getting in trouble like you do when you’re mean to other people’s kids.

4. Graham thuds out of bed and does all of his morning checklist before he even says good morning. He doesn’t want a snack until he’s been awake a little while, so we get dressed and go for our nature stomp.

Here’s Nicolaus, ready to go. This one’s from a couple of weeks ago, before he got the “I really do have parents” style haircut. But you’ll note that the bird in a travel cage is a key fashion accessory. He made the strap himself out of… gosh I don’t remember what. It’s sturdy though.

5. Now it’s time for our nature stomp-around. It’s not a walk because we don’t usually leave our property.

The first time I told Graham that we were going to start doing daily nature walks, he almost cried. “NO.” he told me, “Let’s NOT do that. That is the worst idea possible and I hope you accidentally crumple the idea of nature walks up and flush it down the potty before you notice what you were even flushing because I seriously HATE THAT IDEA.”

He was really tired that night. The next morning, he still insisted that nature walks were a horrible idea. I don’t know what he thinks nature walks are, but when I proposed a nature walk-around our yard instead of a nature walk, he was game. And now they love it and rush to get dressed so we can go. Here they are eating honeysuckle.

I’m a jerk right, because the idea isn’t just to play outside. It’s a guided activity. We’ve been learning about ancient philosophers a little bit and communing with nature is important to Asian philosophy. I’m also going to talk about truth, beauty, and goodness next week — so this week I have them gathering something beautiful, something good, and something they want to know the truth about.

It started out like this:

Now we actually call it Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I honestly don’t know where we’re going with this topic but it’s already led to some interesting conversations. Are beautiful things the same as the good things? Who decides what’s beautiful and what’s good? They decided that beauty is an opinion (because they like a lot of plants that people consider weeds) but good things just ARE good because they help other things live.

Today for beauty, Graham pulled me over to see the tiny, tiniest little bloom he could find amongst the wild strawberry in our back yard. “I picked that cute, tiny thing for beauty because in a few days or maybe later today it’s going to be a flower. But right now it’s so cute that it’s really beautiful.” Then for goodness he put a clover leaf into my hand and said, “My thing for goodness is nature itself.”

Nature itself? Five year olds can come up with this stuff?

Then Nicolaus ran over with a handful of weeds. Beauty!

For goodness, he went and found a small twig. He said “This represents goodness because the thin twig is the end of a little branch. And that leads to a bigger branch, which leads to a limb, which goes back to the whole trunk which supports the whole entire tree which generates oxygen which helps us live.” He was excited and said all of this in one breath. Well! There you go.

So. I might need to re-read some Plato this weekend. It’s been awhile.

6. By this point we’re all really hungry and thirsty, so we go inside.

7. After a meal, we take down the new calendar. I wish this was a better picture. You can’t see the details! It’s going to be neat as we add more stuff to it through the year.

The boys show me where we are in the year. I’m mean so I make them find it every day. This always leads to a big discussion about how much longer till birthdays and holidays and everything.

8. Now it’s time for desk work. Some days this is pen and paper writing and math problems. Other days we work on the giant whiteboard. We recently celebrated a numbers wedding, where all of the pairs of numbers that add up to ten vowed to always add up to ten, for all of infinity. Yesterday I asked Nicolaus to come up with a math lesson for Graham and I using an 18-cup egg carton and a pack of gummy bears. He struggled with it but came up with a pretty good lecture on multiplication.

He was nervous about doing a good enough job, and even made himself an elaborate Star Trek-themed cheat sheet with answers to 3×6, 1×18, etc.

We work on all kinds of things like that until around 2:00.

9. At this point I start to panic because I need to get some work done, so I either set them up with work/learning games on the computer and/or my phone OR they can do something constructive OR they can watch an educational show that goes with whatever we are studying. Graham pouts because he wants to watch Phineus and Ferb, but then he plays along with us.

This is how Nicolaus watches shows on my computer.

She might be the tamest bird ever.

10. But Nicolaus is not a kid who can sit still for long, so even when he’s watching a show he is also making or doing something. Sometimes he is hammering copper wire or jumping around talking to himself and I wonder how in the heck he is actually watching the show. But he is. He is just ALSO being a ninja or playing a game he made up or using stuffed animals to make a funny play about Abraham arguing with the burning bush.


11. Then Kevin comes home, and we have our late afternoon. This might involve a class or running errands, or it might mean working in the basement, or playing or doing more reading work or helping with dinner or goodness knows what.

12. Suddenly it’s almost 9:00! How did that happen?? Bedtime checklist. Followed by me reading (or Nicolaus reading a story to Graham while I straighten their room and pretend not to be thrilled that he is reading). And somehow Nicolaus sneaks in some kind of craft project. No matter how hard I try to make bedtime boring, I turn around and the kid has made a prototype of a magnetic hinged gate for the top-of-ladder entrance to his top bunk or a pop-up card or an elaborate board game or a comic book…

… or a samurai costume.

And finally, the day is done. Nicolaus gets about thirty minutes to listen to a story on my phone, then we switch it to Vivaldi and turn off all but the dimmest lights and they eventually fall asleep. Unless something exciting happens like tonight when we lost power right at bedtime and it was so exciting being in a dark, quiet room that neither of them could stand the idea of missing even one second of it.

Have you ever been driving in traffic, anxious to get home before the storm hits? You can see it in your mirrors, boiling purple clouds full of lightening and hail and cows back there. It’s heading this way. The wind here is already picking up, bending the pines so their tops point toward home. If this light would just turn… if these stupid cars would clear out of the way. Doesn’t anyone else SEE this thing coming? The radio traffic and weather guy is yelling at everyone to stay indoors. Very helpful.

It’s stressful and impatient and thrilling. At every green light you hit the gas, and the sky overhead is suddenly much darker; you turn on your wipers and oh and you just wish you could drive straight ahead without braking until you make it home.

I’m feeling antsy lately like that. We are on the verge of something.

In my twenties I felt like this all the time, like we could do anything, solve any problem if we could push through and ask the right questions and gather all of the right data first and then quiet our minds. We could just see the right answers. They were right over there. We were always on the verge of breaking through it all.

So here we are. And we’ve got this business, see. And we can SEE the next level, the level where we go from tiny business to respectable small business, the level where our stuff is out there on the shelves of friendly chain stores and we’re in all the major museum gift shops and things are humming along. Not greedy. We don’t need to be Melissa & Doug big. We just want to be big enough that our little family can live on our income without sliding back into debt. We aren’t trying to get rich. We just want to pay our rent and buy fancy dog food for Beezus that doesn’t make her fart and have health insurance and maybe take a road trip now and then.

I estimate that to get to that level we need to be selling about three times what we’re selling now. Which doesn’t sound easy, but it also doesn’t sound all that crazy. People do it, don’t they? Small businesses exist.

Ahh but do they do it entirely by reinvesting the profits from the business? That’s what we’re doing. No loans or investors or other fancy business school words that mean other people’s money. Is that brilliant of us because debt is a huge burden on a tiny business? Or is it dumb because the lack of immediate cash causes us to miss opportunities for growth? I can’t figure it out. And I can’t figure out how we will figure it out. So for now, we’re being patient. Sitting in traffic. Hands tight on the steering wheel, waiting and watching the wind.

In junior high and high school, my friend Dylan and I were sure that we were hilarious. We drafted a lot of comedy sketches that would have mainly been entertaining to the five people who knew us well enough to be assured that we were kidding around and not crazy and horrible people who would ever really do that kind of thing to rats. One of our favorite show ideas was this soap opera about regular boring stuff — and remember this was the olden days when there really weren’t that many channels or shows on television so everyone knew soap operas at least a little bit. So we had drama after drama playing out over scenarios like someone running a little late and then getting stuck in traffic or someone struggling with the pain of a hangnail or reading the newspaper in real time and I promise it was all way funnier than it sounds now, because reality shows hadn’t been invented right so the idea of watching people do boring stuff was silly. But one of the recurring things was this woman who was always losing her mind and freaking out because her family would use things and not put them back in the drawer. The line that made us laugh until we nearly peed our pants every time we said it because it was just so stupid was, “WHERE… ARE THE GOOD SCISSORS?!”

Oh my god we were funny. But here I am now, a much older and more sophisticated writer with the perspective that comes with maturity and I’ve come to realize that our idea actually was not funny at all. Because I am a mother now and no, seriously WHERE ARE THE MFING SCISSORS?

It’s frustrating because we have many pairs of scissors. And! every time I look at my children, they are cutting paper or tin foil or styrafoam or whatever is around them into interesting shapes. You know how Pigpen always had a cloud of dust following him? My kids have little flurries of confetti around them all the time, everywhere they go. And you just can’t DO that effectively without scissors. But somehow all of the scissors in this house disappear as soon as I need them, and no one has any ideas where I should look.

So now here I am, up after midnight trying to wind down for bed and get our school stuff ready for tomorrow. We are going to make a new calendar, a giant kid-friendly one that shows the whole year all at once in a giant wheel so they can see at a glance how far apart different seasons and months and holidays are, so they can grasp that it’s a cycle and that the earth physically moves around the sun throughout the year and damn it, it’s all printed out on twelve beautiful, color-coded, labeled and numbered sheets and I can’t find any scissors.

This is probably the worst Easter post I have ever written.

I look around at our living room full of incandescent light and books and heavily abused furniture. There’s a yellow dog asleep next to me, stretched out with her neck twisted and her feet in the air like she’s faking her death. There are things that need to be picked up off the floor. From here I can see a box set of the complete animated Star Trek series, a realistic rubber vampire bat, part of an owl costume, one running shoe. Two dog toys, one that looks like part of a dead animal and one that looks like it was purchased at an adult novelty store. There’s also a small wooden treasure box that belongs to Graham, and an obnoxious talking toy robot that he bought for himself with his birthday money. One toy metal car. One drawing of an outer space battle scene. One tool box and part of a fleet of paper airplanes which were designed to fit all inside each other along with confetti hidden in a little hatch, so that zoooom! The confetti bomb would drop one way while eight different progressively smaller paper planes would loop off in another direction and even though I openly expressed boring grownuppish worry about the mess this would produce, I had to agree that the effect was pretty sweet. Anyway it made a mess. I did make them pick up the planes, but through the day they were somehow scattered again.

Clearly I should be cleaning up the living room instead of writing about it, but that’s the thing — it doesn’t look that messy. Everything feels calm in here tonight. Boys are asleep. Dog is asleep. Kevin’s asleep. All I can hear is the fishtank bubbling and the house popping and the dog snoring because she does that.

Yesterday I had no energy. But in between my two guilt-ridden naps the boys were fed, schooled, fed again, schooled some more, then allowed to watch Dinosaur Train while Kevin made dinner and I straightened things up a little. Then they were fed again, cleaned up, read to, talked to, played with, fed one last time and then put to bed.

And today was a little bit better than yesterday. I woke up from terrible nightmares and forced myself out of bed. We ate good food all day and did spelling and math work. I found out that Nicolaus has a better understanding of world geography than I did in high school, and it feels nice knowing that no one ever pushed him or drilled him on countries or continents. He has learned it in little layers over time as we talk about the world and the history of everything. This is the fundamental thing of everything we’re doing, so any little bit of evidence that it works always makes me happy.

So instead of looking at the mess and thinking about how much I suck, tonight I’m looking at it all with a calm sense that we’re doing alright. In fact I’m mostly even proud of the job we’re doing. Which, don’t worry, I’m not kidding myself here. We are so far from perfect parents who I imagine help their children dress themselves every morning in crisp, ironed shirts and socks that match each other and have set times for everything and who never say things like “Sweet heck, child! How is it possible that you need your nails trimmed again? THIS is why I don’t want you eating fruits and vegetables. Those things only encourage your hair and nails to grow and do you think we have time to constantly groom you? Do you know why Rapunzel’s dad did the thing with the tower?? Because the weekly trims were just ridiculous, that’s why.”

We were hit with another squall line late last night. It surprised me; I didn’t know the weather was supposed to do that. It was really intense for about 20 minutes, then eased off into regular thunderstorms, and then just rain and rain.

When I was younger — and I mean younger like 32 — thunderstorms paralyzed me with fear. The reaction was irrational and physical. When I was a little kid and a storm hit late at night, I would lie there awake, completely sure that we were all going to die and if I did pull together the courage to get up and find my parents, it was to ask to PLEASE let me sleep in their bed. They usually said yes, and so I’d perch up on their pillows like a cat avoiding a flash flood and try to fall asleep even though I still felt pretty sure we were all going to die. But at least we’d all die together! Except for my brother who was asleep in the next room, but you know, what are the chances that the lightening or tornado would hit both bedrooms? Putting all our eggs in one basket didn’t make good evolutionary sense.

So even though my anxiety over storms is hugely better now that I take small amounts of Zoloft every night, last night was rough. While I was sitting at the dining room table listening for sirens and hitting refresh on the weather map, Nicolaus got out of bed and found me. I heard his feet clunk across the wood floor and ah, I thought, the storm woke him up. But instead of asking me to save him from the life-threatening terrible storm, he skipped past me and said, “Sorry for getting up, I needed a quick drink of water.”

He got a cup of water and headed back to his room. Thunder cracked right above our house and my heart jumped. He stopped and turned around and said, “So. Sometimes I see lightening and then there’s just never any thunder with that flash. Does that mean it’s so far away that it’s taking the sound like an hour to get here or something? Like if I WAIT will it be one of the booms we hear later on? But how will we know which sound goes to which lightening flash? Oh! Can it sometimes be too far away for the sound to get here at all?”
This could go on for a long time so I lovingly shooed him back into bed, and that was it. It doesn’t occur to either of them that storms might be scary. I love that. I’m proud of that. It hasn’t been easy all these years to play it cool and act like we aren’t going to maybe die any minute.

Same with strangers. Both of them will talk to people we just met like it’s nothing at all. That’s amazing. I’m still nervous about talking to strangers! But they talk to people everywhere we go, they ask questions — and so the world is theirs in that way.

So yay. This week is no less messy and lame and frustrating than any other week. But I’m feeling less distracted by the frustrations and failings. I feel proud of the work we’ve put in to make our crazy little life work to the extent that it does. Why now? What’s changed? I don’t know. But it’s nice.

I’ve been sick this week, some sort of vague but awful stomach and joint ache combination. At night I either lie awake feeling seasick or I fall asleep and have these thick stressful dreams. During the day I’m pushing hard not to be nearly as lame as I feel. I got up early yesterday morning and fixed my bed so I wouldn’t be tempted to crawl back into it, which didn’t stop me from dozing off on the couch a few times but that’s not as bad.

But! Achebe was wrong; things don’t always fall apart. A lot of times things keep right on going forward. So it’s Friday now and we’re having a week. This week we’ve been talking about ancient Japan and I discovered that oh oh oh I am so very, very bad at origami. It’s weird. It’s the kind of thing I should be very good at! But I can’t even master the basic folds. Everything comes out all lumpy and crooked and sometimes I can’t even understand what they are telling me to do.

Step 1. Fold paper in half, diagonally to form a crease. Unfold.

Step 2. Make a horizontal valley fold to form another crease. Unfold.

Step 3. Using both thumbs, invert the cellular plane and crossbeam over to the riptide point. Seal with confectioner’s tar. Cover with a towel, allow thirty minutes for yeast to rise.

And this is simple books! Beginner origami books for children. I understand that Japan is going through a hard time right now so I don’t want to be mean about it but really they could stand to work with the IKEA guys on their instructions a little bit. Or no, LEGO! Lego instructions are much better than IKEA. Pretend I said Lego.

So that’s one good lesson we learned this week in school. Then somehow we got thrown into learning all about dinosaurs, which happens and was completely off-topic but I didn’t have the energy this week to steer things back to Japan. I read aloud equal parts ancient Japanese culture and folklore and details on different kinds of raptors, which did you know are actually called dromeosaurs? It’s also interesting to note that the smallest dinosaur ever to live is thought to be the modern-day hummingbird.
Some weeks we put together beautiful little folders all about what we’re studying. This wasn’t one of those weeks.

But! Nicolaus has decided he wants to take some sort of martial arts class, ideally one that includes scaling walls, the art of concealing one’s true identity and the twin arts of dart making and poison mixing. We are looking around. I’ve found two or three studios in the area that don’t make a big deal about being Christ-based. Which is just weird, right? I’m going to skip the silly and overly-wordy jokes about Jesus doing martial arts because it’s sort of obvious and I don’t feel well. But whether you’re religious or not — it’s weird, right? In general, it seems like Christians would be offended by the use of something sacred to pander to them but something about martial arts is just… odd? The Lord Wants YOU to learn how to KICK SOME ASS.

Anyway. The study of Japan has sealed the deal for Nicolaus: he wants to learn proper moves, ideally ones involving weapons because cool weapons are one of the top five great things about being a person on planet earth.

Now pretend I just did another whole thing about my little innocent kid becoming a sophisticated weapon-wielding eight-to-twelve year old. We good?

We’ve also been working on the reading business. To help with fluency I wrote out sentences like this:
The
The dog
The dog jumped
The dog jumped over
The dog jumped over me.

It helps with reading smooooothly in.stead.of.like.this.

I also type out stories or paragraphs where I switch colors every few words in little chunks to help those words hang together. I’m not sure how to change colors of text in a blog post but it basically works like this to group phrases together.

For whatever reason, the color switching helps tremendously. I wish I could get books for him that were printed this way. For now I’m typing out copyrighted material, upping the font size and changing the font color every few words, printing it out, and hoping that this is just a transitional thing. He’s almost there. The difference is already amazing… the other night he read something to Kevin and I asked him “Do you realize that this is the same thing that made you cry a month ago because it was just too hard?”

He beamed. Then he did a bunch of fake Kung-fu moves because that’s what you do when you feel great about yourself.

Side note. I don’t mention this often, but for visualization purposes it’s important to remember that most of the time during these conversations, he is wearing his bathrobe and there is a small parrot somewhere in that robe. I forget that he has her with him and then she peeks out of his pockets or his sleeve or his collar or the front v-neck. The effect is every bit as adorable and disturbing as you might imagine. I wash the robe frequently.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a business to run! If you’re with us over on the Facebook thingy, you saw that Kevin shipped out a nice big number of pendants, earrings, and cufflinks this week. At the same time I had to fill my largest wholesale order since last November. Packing regular daily orders is a constant little hum; wholesale orders are more like an orchestra tuning up. We have to pull out everything and count it all out, re-count it all, package each thing, label it all, maybe count again? Add artist info cards, assemble shipping boxes, pack pack pack, pad with recycled packing paper, tape, label in detail, weigh it, print the shipping label, drop it off at UPS, high five ourselves because woooooo! We did it!

Meanwhile, I’m trying to be that freak person who does dishes and laundry a little each day. It’s nuts. How long will it last?? NO ONE KNOWS. Poor Kevin, his standards are so low that he comes home and says “The house looks great!” There are still piles of clutter everywhere and live chickens pecking around in the background, but there are clean towels and cups and so he’s impressed. You hear me, newlywed wives? Spend these first years setting that bar LOW.

In summary, despite my stupid body’s best efforts at messing everything up, things are going well.