You know how kids get on those kicks that marketers love and strangers find endearing and parents enjoy for the first week and then have to go to the liquor store just so they can make it through another day where their child is demanding non-stop conversation about a single topic? I have a friend whose child is so randomly obsessed with Michael Jackson that she has to sneak his single white glove into the laundry. I met a four year old in a waiting room who liked school buses with the kind of devotion that kids normally use to make Disney Corporation very, very rich. He knew all of the logos of all of the companies that make school buses and could draw the different types of bus from different angles in a heck of a lot of detail if you gave him your pen, which of course I did. His mom gave me that helpless look which is “I’m sorry, my awesome child has latched onto you and you now have to hear all about school buses.”

I give people the same look if they make the time-management mistake of asking Nicolaus about his bird, or if they ask Graham “Do you have any questions?”
Because OH YES Graham has questions. It doesn’t matter that the poor man clearly meant do you have any questions about tonight’s dinner specials, Graham has already seized the opportunity to get a few things straight. What exactly happens if you stare at the sun? What’s the number AFTER the highest number if you are counting by tens? If someone tried to cut the earth in half with a huge long knife, would it be like I see the tip of the knife sawing right in front of me and they are actually standing like RIGHT BEHIND ME? Because their knife is seriously somehow that big? Could that work like that? Are cats ever allowed in this restaurant? Do you have a cat? Are you the same person who will actually cook the food? If not then how will that person know what we want? And why don’t they ask us themselves so they know for sure what we want? And if you had a pet cat would you give it milk or water to drink? And did you know that my brother has a pet bird?

And except for the rare awesome good sport and/or grandmotherly type, the waiter always looks at us and pleads silently for us to give him an out. Kevin laughs and I give them the “oh god, I am so sorry” look.

–!Begin actual post!–
Kids get obsessed with stuff and you can’t predict what their weird little minds will latch onto. This summer the big Nicolaus thing has been chemistry. ALL chemistry all the time, with the rare break to talk about LEGO ninjas. Well! So! That’s a great obsession to have, right? It’s not trademarked by Disney, it doesn’t involve listening to Man in the Mirror very many times, and it’s a chance to teach science and encourage reading and experimentation and everything great.

But let me tell you a secret about the brain I live within: in here, chemistry makes no sense.

We’ve been in the situation before where Nicolaus wanted to know all about something that I’d never learned much about. I’m not sure I even knew the word dirigible before he started demanding to know the difference between a zeppelin and a regular blimp and all of the design of the internal structure and oh man, kid, seriously? I don’t know! I don’t know because I’ve never cared enough to find out! Can’t you get obsessed with something that I paid attention to growing up? Wouldn’t you like to know about the groundbreaking work done on Three’s Company, All in the Family, and One Day at a Time? I also know the theme songs.

His many history obsessions have been embarrassingly challenging for me. I grew up in Texas where history is taught using a Davy Crocket-based curriculum. I also had what would in modern times would be diagnosed as ADD — back the it was called a stubborn interest drawing dogs and horses instead of listening in class — so even my knowledge of Mr.Crockett is limited to what happened in the most interesting 10 minutes of that one film strip.

As a kid I especially resisted learning anything about boring ancient Greece and the stupid lame Roman Empire. Once my uncle was babysitting us and we were awful so he threatened to punish us by making us watch Quo Vadis and Ben Hur. We laughed at him and committed ourselves to being as obnoxious as possible. Well you have to follow through, right? He put on several hours of movies about ancient Rome. You’d think I’d have learned something during those educational documentaries, but no. I flopped on the couch and read Bunnicula, occasionally looking up to see some sweaty technicolor bearded guy fall off his chariot. That’s all I brought to the table when Nicolaus launched his Roman obsession at age five.

But I managed to learn it. After the boys went to bed I would hit the internet and try to learn as much as I could about ancient history so I’d be something of an authority on the subject for the five year old. And eventually I was piecing it all together and enjoying it. “Kevin OMG. Did you know that history repeats itself?? This is awesome!”

But chemistry is not like that. Regular, graspable things like history can be punched through with questions. With chemistry, I don’t even understand enough to know what to ask. Same goes for some kinds of math, most of political-economic theory and everything written by Derrida. It’s not that I’ve never studied these things. It’s that the ideas won’t go in. It’s past the edge of my intelligence. I can see the other side where it all would make sense if I were a different person, but there’s fog in between me and it.

So over the summer, I stayed up late reading about how chemistry works, I watched the Kahn academy videos and You Tube lessons and Beakman’s world and Zoom and everything and honestly I still don’t understand how things that small can ACT LIKE THAT. You are telling me that this molecule plus this molecule does this insane other thing that really? Why would it want to do that?? And this element won’t combine or react with anything else? But why not? It takes the kind of leap of faith as trusting that database programming isn’t wizardry. I believe that chemistry exists and works, but only barely.

So yeah! There are all these tiny invisible particles that like to be together, except for the ones that must never be together. They like to be apart. And the ones who like to be together have to get together in certain patterns because otherwise everything goes all scrambly and the universe falls apart. And that, son, is why vinegar and baking soda do that fizz thing. That’s why mentos. That’s why pH, that’s why solids and metals and temperature and catalysts, it’s why surface tension, and it’s why you really should wear eye protection and label all of your vials. I’m doing my best with books, online recipes and I can follow those.

But sometime in July I decided that either chemistry secretly makes no sense and everyone is just pretending and/or using linguistic conceits to construct a fake model that we can all talk about OR this is something I don’t get to ever understand.

So if he asks me WHAT happens, I can tell him or look it up. But if he asks details about WHY and HOW, I quickly fall back to “Well see… I don’t really get that, either. We will need to look that up later…”

He asked for a chemistry set so he could stop waiting for me to learn and just figure out everything on his own. Fair enough. We started looking for chemistry kits for kids, and quickly realized that most of the kits out there are pretty expensive and come with very small quantities of the cool stuff. Or NONE of the cool stuff which is just — what? That’s right, we found a $30 chemistry set which brags on the front “CONTAINS NO CHEMICALS!”
This kit also included safety goggles with the warning: WARNING: SAFETY GOGGLES ARE A TOY. WILL NOT SERVE AS SAFETY PROTECTION.

Look guys, clearly you don’t really want to make a chemistry set and that’s okay. No one is making you do this.

After looking at ten or twelve different chemistry sets, we (I) decided that sets are silly and we don’t need one. Instead we would go to the grocery store and buy some cool stuff in bulk.

Here’s what we got at the grocery store:
Vinegar
Lemon Juice
Rubbing alcohol
Hydrogen Peroxide (which he tells me should be called Dihydrogen Dioxide)
Baking soda
Baking powder
Cornstarch
Yeast
An aloe leaf
Red cabbage
Quixoine or whatever that stuff is that makes you sick but glows under black light
Glue
Borax
Club soda
Diet soda
Mentos
Measuring spoons, measuring cups
Gloves
Several sterilite bins with lids
Alka-seltzer

Here’s what we ordered online:
Washable color tablets
A variety of different polymers
A truckload of vials with screw caps
Medicine droppers
Cups with lids
Dust masks
Alum (red and white)
pH strips
A small black light
Actual safety goggles
Funnels
Stir sticks
Plastic petri dishes
A nice-sized poster of the periodic table.

It sounds like a huge amount of stuff, but most of it’s in small containers. We let him turn our dining room antique hutch into a small laboratory. And he was off! Awesome, awesome stuff he’s figured out. And I am learning too! Things like “chemistry makes a huge mess” and “the dining room is an awful place for a labratory” and “that weird smell is mostly vinegar.”

He is having a huge crazy good time with it all. He’s made elephant toothpaste, gak, silly putty and other non-newtonian fluid, fizzy things, glow under black light things, and many vials of cleaning fluids. He made tiny explosions by setting up pressure in a closed vial and we realized oh! House rule! Don’t do that. He discovered the joys of mixing colored water with drops of oil, he develops theories and tests and measured outcomes and if he ever starts labeling his stuff oh my goodness he will be unstoppable. Until he turns his focus to something new, like botany or flags or scroll saws.

Graham went to bed mad at me for insisting that it was time for sleep. This morning he woke up and said he had the WORST nightmare anyone has ever had.

Then he described the dream and you know what was so horrible?

There were two of me.

Every night I open this Firefox window where I plan to sum it all up in a great snappy post with a happening beat. There are so many words, so many ideas and memories of this time to solidify. Developmental jumps forward and back. Hilarious squabbles, wonderful projects, huge, wonderful questions that teach me everything about these boys, crazy mixups and cooked-up schemes, and oh there are fart jokes. I always think I’ll definitely write about this because it is so good that how could I not? But then when the house is finally quiet and I’m ready to type a new post, there are too many words and the bigness of the day swells up and I can’t even start.

So instead of writing, I consume things. I hop over to hulu or netflix or TED or NPR or YouTube. I hit Reddit a thousand times in the one hour after the boys go to bed, like that dazed chain smoker at the 7-11 video slot machine. I read about things I will never need to know about, things that really no one needs to know about except for those few focused people whose job is knowing all about that one thing.

Ping ping ping I go all over the internet like a little hummingbird, nature’s most iridescent sufferer of ADHD not counting the rainbow trout — which, screw those guys.

Anyway.

Nicolaus spent the first eight years acting as though we were failing him. In between his gleeful piles of words, he glared, he griped, he sighed and looked soulfully out the window because these really were his real parents and we suck at everything from keeping schedules to answering his many dirigible questons to basic 8-course meal production to early morning reveille.

But it turns out that eight’s an easier crowd. Eight tries to go easy on us, and when he forgets to remember that we are doing our defective best, he comes back and apologizes.

Once in awhile, in the middle of nothing at all he will sigh, “I really love our daily routine.”

The first time he said it, Kevin and I looked at each other. I gave him a look like this O_o which means “Wha-? Where in the lovely heck did that come from?” And Kevin’s look to me was this O_O which means “what kind of crappy teacher are you that he is eight and he can’t use the word Routine correctly in a sentence?”

We asked him to tell us what he likes about it, hoping for details, fascinated by the idea that anyone who lives with us might think we have one of those.

But it turns out that he’s right, we do have a routine. Grown up life takes shape so gradually you might not even notice. One day you’re making dorky, date-night visits to ridiculous places like Linens N Things (where things turns out to be more linens. And consumer debt.) just to walk around and make fun of all the crap that people like and before you know it you are telling each other that you need to run to Bed Bath and Beyond to return some utilitarian thing you bought and exchange it for another, more appropriately sized kitchen utensil or toothbrush wrangler or floor mat because you know? This is how it happens.

And somewhere in between trips to big boxes we not only developed a routine, but we somehow shaped young Morrissey into a kid who will spontaneously express joy and gratitude. Heck, I’ll say it. I’m proud.

So envision us driving, and it’s hot outside, and the boys are in their booster seats in the messy back of my little car, and they’re eating the mostly healthy lunch I packed for them and we’re talking about ecosystems. It started ten or fifteen minutes ago when I watched the garage door close and Graham asked a question. I thought I would remember the question because it was so good! But I don’t. But that question led to other, bigger questions until we were talking about balance and ecosystems and unbalancing things like tiger mosquitoes and kudzu and everything else that gets imported and causes a ruckus.

Graham asks me to stop pointing out kudzu along the road because the amorphous blobby edges of the woods upset him. He likes trees and seeing them in the throes of being devoured in slow-motion is “just too sad.”

Then I’m waiting to turn left and the boys are quiet and then Nicolaus says, “Humans are so weird. How we – how they just. People work so much and so hard to figure everything out and that’s why they do things like bring kudzu on purpose somewhere. Even though it didn’t work like at ALL, people were thinking thinking to figure out how to feed their cows.”

“That’s true,” I say.

I’m out in the intersection, waiting for an opening. He isn’t finished, “I mean, think about math. How does anyone know that counting works for sure? How did they ever really prove any of this like one plus one equals two… like, how? Until they were completely positive that okay THIS is what’s really happening. And then! Then! We have all of these different languages that we use to talk about everything with so much detail. Isn’t that weird? Like birds just have bird language. They might have different accents but there’s only one birdie language.

And do you think that all the different human languages kind of like came from just ONE basic human language?”

I started to say something about how mathematicians and scientists and everyone has been working to fact check every idea for thousands of years, but then it was my turn to go and someone ran the yellow light and I had to pay attention to where we were going. I tell him he’s right, humans are very devoted/obsessive problem solvers, and promise myself to revisit this thought.

But the animal language thing sets him off. “I mean, you know what else is funny about people? I mean think about them thinking thinking for hundreds of years and learning and studying everything and they are *just now* starting to understand that mmmmaybe animals might actually be intelligent. MAYBE some animals can communicate or care about their babies or use tools or whatever it is, they always think Oh! Humans are the ONLY ones who — uhhh oh wait. I guess not! But that’s so obvious. How did all these smart people think and think and never realize that?”

I’m following my little blue dot on the google map and trying to focus on the conversation.

“Well,” I told him, “You know, it’s just that for a long time people didn’t really understand that we are just animals on a planet somewhere. It never occurred to them that other animals might be smart because humans thought they were the center of everything.”

“Yeah but come ON! Is it not super obvious that animals can figure things out?”

“Remember though,” I tell him, “– until pretty recently in history humans thought that we were literally at the center of the universe. Like they thought that everything else orbited around Earth. So they assumed that meant that humans must be very unique and special in the universe. Because they were at the exact center.”

“Well… technically they were right about that.”

“About what?”

“About being at the center of the universe.”

“No — I mean they thought that humans are at the literal center.”

“I know!”

“What do you mean?”

“I was thinking about this. The universe is infininite. So if you are standing on the earth, how far is it in that direction? Infininite. How far is it in the other direction? Infininite. EVERY direction is just infininitely far from the edge of the universe.”

“Huh.”

“SO! Every place, no matter where you are in the universe you technically ARE in the exact center. Every blob. Every little atom — that exact point has to be at the exact center of the universe. You get it?”

“Where did you hear about this?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it last night and I started laughing about that because you get it?”

Well no wonder the kid has hell falling asleep. And no wonder I drove two miles past my turn before noticing. And no wonder my brain is too buzzy and scrambly by the end of the day to write.