It’s hard to pick up a blog after a break. I used to do the same things to my diaries when I was a kid, and to my journals when I was a young adult and to all of my friends and family and relationships once I was grown.

But hi! I’m still here, still thinking of bits and pieces of things to jot down and never quite pulling together a fully formed update.

This month we took a couple of weeks off from selling stuff and drove to Texas for my all-time favorite teacher’s retirement party. He is famous for his wisdom:
Nothing of any value was ever measured by a test.

If you turn your underwear inside out, you can wear it for another five days.

Worth every bit of hassle getting there. I always said that I’d never go to a high school reunion because the people I’d want to see were all the kind of people who would never go to a high school reunion. But! All of those kind of people WOULD go to thank this teacher for being awesome. Many of us were in the club he sponsored, The Anti-Social Club — friends of people who have no friends. and back then we spent hundreds of hours there talking and crying and laughing about everything and anything. Those are the kinds of friends you can meet back up with twenty years later and oh! Hi! No awkwardness at all, just details to fill in about jobs and pets and spouses and all.

I need to post a picture to show you how funny we looked all crammed into our XB, two parents, two kids, a too-big dog and a small parrot. And all of our toys and snacks and clothes and pet food and extra blankets and pillows because the car’s not very comfortable on long trips and swimming stuff for in case we found a motel with a pool. New art supplies to fascinate the boys on the drive there, Lego sets to entertain them on the drive back. The whole crew travels remarkably well considering how dramatic a quick trip to the bank can be. Something about the excitement of a road trip settles them down.

Graham gets restless because he is five and being five is mostly about jumping up and down and standing on your head, which isn’t allowed by carseats. Oh my god I just realized that parents lobbied the government to legislate car seat usage so they’d have a good excuse for why the kids can’t jump around like all of the 1970s soda-drinking, station wagon roaming, pre-ritalin era children used to do. If our parents had told us to sit still and buckle in and stop acting out scenes from Nadia, we could’ve whined and argued and given them a hard time because it’s not like we had anything better to do. But if parents can say “It’s the law.” there, done. No argument.

Although today Graham got so mad at me that he finally said he was going to try and do something that would make him have to go to jail. He often threatens to do the most horrible thing he can think of, which is almost always something that would be a punishment for him. Like “If you don’t say yes then I will never play Go Fish with you AGAIN.” or “I am never going to even LOOK AT MY FAVORITE BOOK again!”

So when he threatened to have himself arrested, Kevin and I looked at each other and for a tiny second we sort of wanted to call the cops on him. I later asked Graham what he was going to do to try and get arrested, and he cheerfully (because he’d long since forgiven me) said “Well? I wasn’t sure exactly but I was pretty sure I might go to jail if I started breaking light switches in the house.”
Whenever he gets really really mad his impulses turn to home renovation. My dad is the same way, and after 20 years or so he has managed to randomly beat the house into a pretty cool shape.

The thing is, at his core, Graham is so fundamentally upbeat that when he is really outraged it seems to almost shock him that he’d feel that way. It usually goes like this:
“I am so mad! Everyone just hates me. NO ONE COME NEAR ME!!”

Then Kevin will say, “Aw, what about Beezus? She didn’t do anything to you.”

“No one better come near me except Beezus. Or any other pets. NO ONE.”

Then Nicolaus will say, “Hey, what about me? Why are you mad at me?”

“Oh, Nicolaus you can come near me if you want to. It’s just the grownups who can’t.”

And Kevin will say, “Well you know, your mama is the one who was being mean. I tried to convince her to let you have the popsicle.”

“Daddy, you can come near me! That’s fine!” he’ll say cheerfully. Then he puts on his angry face and adds darkly, “But NOT. MAMA.”

Five minutes later he forgets and starts speaking to me again but boy, for those five minutes let me tell you I am on the serious shit list.

There will be more eloquent updates through the week. I just wanted to post so that I won’t feel so shy about posting. Topics include:
What we’re working on (yay!)
Illnesses (boo)
Reading (yay?)
How much I like my dog even though she tried to kill Kevin
What my kids wear and how they decide what to wear
Thoughts about homeschooling and learning in general
Ranting and cheering about Legos.
Tornadoes
And more!

But really, right now I need to go to bed before Kevin’s morning alarm goes off and makes me look like an idiot who took a nap from 4:30-6:30 this evening.

Energy, focus, motivation, ambition, time. All of these things have to be there or nothing gets done.

A lot of days I have energy and time and focus, but lack motivation. On those days, I play elaborate pretend games with the kids or work only on things that need immediate attention. Those days are fun and feel busy, but nothing gets crossed off of my list of things to do.

On days where I have everything but focus, I write out a huge list and then zip like a furious bee from thing to thing to thing. I do 20% of thirty different things and at the end of the day everything’s still a mess and only part way done and I feel accomplished and yet when I look at the list? Nothing gets crossed off.

Then there are the days where I have all of what I need in my brain! But because of appointments and errands or general grownup problems, there’s not enough time to do the important things. So I spend the day stressed and frazzled and wishing I were doing something else. On those days I usually manage to cross a few things off because it turns out that I have no real concept of how much time anything takes.

Then there are entire weeks where I have focus, motivation, ambition, and time, but NO physical energy. Those days are incredibly frustrating. I usually plow through and get some things done in between micronaps. Those are my worst parenting days I think, or at least my most guilt-ridden because even though I’m taking care of the boys and doing stuff with them, they can probably tell that I’m distracted/ trying to figure out a way to turn this activity into a chance for me to lie down. Works alright for some things — like pretend games (oh no! I walked into a cloud of sleeping gas!) or even school work (let’s sit on the couch and have you guys read this book on the Trojan war to me, okay?). Works less well for things like nature walks, putting away laundry, packing orders, cooking anything more complex than pasta.

I think I always have ambition. I’m not even sure what a day without ambitions would look like. Maybe that’s why somewhere in all of that, we are slowly moving forward. Paying things down, building things up, teaching, learning, talking, playing, working and making and going.

So yeah. This was your childhood, babies. It was noisy and messy, although to be fair you made at least some of the messes and all of the noise. We had fun, we got a lot done, we left a lot undone, but every day seemed huge didn’t it?