It has been a subplot dream sequence kind of week. On April Fool’s Day someone sent an email inviting me to a very cool thing. I rolled my eyes upward and fixed them on some imaginary point in the upper right hand corner of the scene and sighed a wistful sigh, thinking how nice it would be if the email were real and not a mean joke. Everything got blurry and then refocused as I saw myself reading other bloggers’ accounts of SciFoo as the coolest, funnest, life-changingest thing they’d ever been to. Then I imagined me replying to the email and saying: Yes, I graciously accept your invitation to come to California and be the dumbest person in the room.

Right after I replied, Tim O’Reilly wrote a thing about my baby books on twitter.
Right after that, people emailed me nice things about the baby books and some people ordered things.
Then Boingboing posted about my other book, Pat Schrodinger’s Kitty.
Then a lot of people ordered things.

Meanwhile, back in the main plotline, we started thinking maybe we should move into a bigger apartment. So we rode the elevator up and down and looked at all of the nice available apartments with their spacious living rooms and upgraded kitchens. I kept expecting to walk into one that felt like aha! This is it, THIS is the beautiful place with the great view and the high wonderful cool urbanite ceilings where we belong.

We looked at half a dozen lofts and none of them were exciting enough to justify the hassle of moving and the increase in rent. Walking back into our own 900 square foot, weirdly cavelike space we all felt a wave of Oh wait! Here it is. Our place doesn’t look like the set of a trendy sitcom — in fact it looks more like a supervillain’s flamboyant underground hideout — but we really do like the place.

The real problem isn’t the apartment, it’s that my god we are stupid packrats. No amount of square footage will fix that. This week while my mom was visiting I forced myself to dig through bins and boxes that we have carried with us for fourteen years. I threw away scribbled grocery lists from the mid-nineties, art supplies from college that were dried out and unusable, and a hundred or so tiny glass contact lens vials which we have moved back and forth across this great nation three times because hey neat! little glass jars! I took five bags of trash to the giant Star Wars-style compactor and drove two large loads to Goodwill where I am told that my donation puts people to work. Get to work, you people! Here is a toddler-sized chair and a bunch of sweaters I don’t wear anymore, and a laser printer that needs toner which costs more than a new laser printer, and a video tape of Bob the Builder which makes me queasy to even think about. Hopefully it will go to someone who really needs it, like maybe a pregnant lady who can use it for four months to babysit her two year old while she sits on the couch and tries not to throw up.

Don’t forget about meanwhile! In the dream sequence: I got invited to a conference for smart people and that led to viral-type publicity and that led to orders which led to me being happy and a little freaked out because oh my god I need to make more books, but that’s okay – I like making them! – but still, woah. And back in the main plot, my mom came into town and paralyzed my children with her iphone so we could clean the holy hell out of everything.

Then she left because she’s mean and doesn’t love me enough to do whatever I want her to do. Can you believe that? Tonight as I tucked my children in bed they almost cried because they miss Mámo and her iphone. I hugged them tight and told them don’t worry, she and it will be back for another visit soon.

In summation, as a new spring dawns and Easter is upon us it is time to reflect about the glories of rebirth and new opportunities that our lives constantly afford us. My business is building momentum, our home can breathe because it isn’t stuffed full of crap and, if my mom comes back again soon, Nicolaus can maybe beat that level of the airplane shooting game.

Some sketches for my newest Nerdy Baby series. These are going to be little 5×7″ prints as soon as they are cleaned up and I’m sure they make sense.

1. My favorite so far:

2. Needs to be re-drawn, and I’m sure the joke has been done before but I refuse to check because I don’t want to know. Oops, and the scanner didn’t pick up the cute little resistor symbols in the background:

3. This one doesn’t quite work, I don’t think. Do you get it?

4. And this is one of good old Maxwell’s equations, all decorated super cute. If I had a jigsaw and the accompanying where-with-all I would make this into those cute painted wood letters that are in all the cute baby rooms these days.

My plan is to also do something like this for all of the favorite constants. Ooh and! One showing the difference between big G gravity and little g gravity.

I was also going to post about today, but it’s almost 2 in the morning and oh my god we need to get our family on a more normal schedule. Nicolaus is in our bed chatting with Kevin. I know that the answer is to set an alarm and wake everyone up early and then prevent napping for a few days in a row and there! it’ll be done. But there’s never a day where dealing with angry/tired zombie children for 12 hours sounds like the best way to go. So every day I wimp out and let them sleep until whenever and– what? it’s not good, right? Needs to stop. Because they are growing children and sunlight is important and everything. Yeah. Alright, you convinced me. I’m going to set an alarm right now.

New prints! Well, not super new but you know. Woot!

I’m working on some big cute equation pieces with puppies and fluffy kitties and bunny rabbits, but the week promises to be too crazy for making new art work. My groovy friend Nina just left town, and we much enjoyed our little vacation from doing school or cleaning or anything we didn’t feel like doing. Instead we let our kids play, we ate yummy food, we went swimming, we took them to a joke and magic shop.

But! Back to reality. Uncommon Goods placed an order for their Mother’s Day catalog – wooo! So I need to spend a day packing and shipping everything for them.

And the baby books are finally arriving from the bindery tomorrow – wooooo! But nearly 30 of them are spoken for, so I need to quickly get the covers decorated, sign them, and pack them all up and send them to their loving new homes. That’s a solid day’s work.

Oh and there’s parenting and schoolwork and whatnot mixed in there. And eating. And personal hygiene. Why is that always last on the list? And! It’s time for another major craptoss. We have a whole rack of sweaters and stuff that we didn’t wear all winter. Time to chuck it all. And then maybe we could make OUR closet into a spaceship too!

Thank you for all the fun comments about the spaceship. The best part is that I had time to read them all because my children were playing in the rocket ship.

Did I tell you that we were building a spaceship? It turns out that closets are the perfect size for a playhouse. Sure, when you’re living in roughly 950 square feet that could be useful storage space but really. If you could go back to your own childhood and choose between having a place to keep clothes and toys and spare sheets or your very own space ship, what would you choose?

If you opted for storage space, you might want to quietly excuse yourself now. It’s awkward. Sorry.

So! The design challenge:

1. Make a children’s bedroom look as though people live there on purpose
2. Give the kids a place to play on rainy days where they can safely jump and/or bounce and/or navigate their way into a black hole by jumping through time thus appearing to go faster than light if for only a moment
3. Don’t do anything permanent or horrifying to the walls because this is an apartment and we’d like to get our deposit back someday without a crazy amount of work.
4. Spend less than $50 on the entire project

These aren’t the greatest pictures, but here it is!

There are four stations: The Lab, The Command Center, Engineering, and Navigation. This helps prevent fighting and allows for one or two more kids to come over and play. I tried to include plenty of assorted things to push and do and wiggle and read to keep them interested.

Here is the Command center:

The lab:

Navigation: (that’s Graham operating the mapping system on his tiny etch-a-sketch)

Engineering:

Window to the outside: (The boys painted this together)

The door… I want to add round windows or something spaceshippy.

Here’s what their room looks like now. It’s hard to see, but there’s a flight path through the solar system drawn on the wall with chalk, and all the planets are labeled.

Oooh dang it, I forgot to take a picture of the fuel cell container. It’s a brushed metal toilet brush holder that was on the damaged clearance aisle at walmart. They have a pair of kitchen tongs for handling the radioactive material, plus safety goggles so I’m sure it’s alright. I handled radioactive fuel cells all the time when I was little and I turned out fine.

So yeah! Yay! They love the spaceship so far and I am dorkishly excited. Most of what’s in there was purchased in the automotive accessory department at Walmart, except the rope lights which were given to us by a kindly internet friend and the cushions on the floor. Those are six-inch foam cushions from an old sectional couch that my parents were throwing away. They’re perfect for jumping and bouncing and falling and maybe even sleeping on.
The posters on the ship’s wall are some of my larger prints that were damaged or creased, so we flipped them over and painted on them. The boys told me what labels and buttons they wanted – the only one I came up myself with was Flux Capacitor. They resisted, but they’ll understand and appreciate that one when they’re older. They drew circuits and all kinds of electronic things, and I painted the walls with verrry pale watercolor. Hopefully that will be easy to cover with a single coat of white when we move.

As for the room, those are vintage posters that decorated my dad’s room when he was a kid. The rug was a gift when Nicolaus was born. The boys’ quilts were handmade by Aunt Alisha and Internet Aunt Amy. The solar system was a project we did together.

Woooooo blast off!

I was sick last week, too sick to think or do much other than whine about being sick.

And! Weird update about the CPSIA stuff: they voted on Friday to delay enforcement for a year while they sort all of this out and get answers for all of the hysterical mommybloggers who want to stay in business. But parent’s groups are suing because the delay will allow us to poison their children for another year. Which really messes up my plans for the new Poisonous ABC flashcards, but we’ll see what happens.

And! EVERYONE. Go find Pregnancy and Newborn magazine! Because they have great advice on how to feel sexy when you’re hugely pregnant which, I’m not calling you fat or anything but… you know?
Oh! And my flashcards are featured this month, right on the page where the magazine naturally falls open because of the little “please subscribe” card thingy.

And! Sudden major life development this week: I am an idiot. For more information, please examine the chart below.

So this week is going to be spent filling happy orders and cleaning up tiny puddles of urine. I’m not sure which is more exciting.