We travel every night. I’ve been dreaming these trips ever since we moved back to Georgia, every night, over and over.

We go alone, or with family or strangers, sometimes with our kids, sometimes with the dog or with lots of dogs.
We travel in an RV or a bus. Or a car or a train or a plane or a submarine amphibious thing that we rent. Occasionally the highway becomes a roller coaster and we start to panic but decide to try it anyway and you know what, it’s fine.
Once there was this enormous spacecraft shaped like a pod with all these portals all around and – but I think we ended up needing to hang glide home which is weird with my thing about heights.

We always travel at night except for when it’s in the day or when it’s somehow both at once.

We stop and run into art stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, little places that serve quick food. We stop and visit people, or we go to incredible junk yards made of mountains and industry and trees. Sometimes we stop to enroll in classes, or we’re in art shows or we’re at big conferences or sprawling abandoned shopping malls. We go see movies. We walk up stairs and eat mexican food on terraces, we look at all different houses and apartments for sale or rent. The homes we look at are always interesting and sprawling, with rooms we wouldn’t discover unless we moved in. Sometimes we stop and look at nothing interesting at all, just offices or motel rooms. Doesn’t matter. I like going and I like being with you.

Sometimes we get lost on the highway a little bit or turn off onto a dark country road that worries us. But I’m never scared; we aren’t running from anything or frantic at all; even when there are tornadoes in the distance or the train breaks down, it’s always clear that we will be okay.

But this is a Father’s Day thing so I shouldn’t wander off talking about our constant non-conscious trips to Dallas and London and Southern Egypt via Cloudbridge (that one was very exciting, I think we prevented a war and everything). The traveling dreams are all about something that I feel but can’t articulate when I’m awake. They’re here in this post because wherever it is we’re trying to go every night, lately it feels like we’re nearly there.

So this year. Big, wasn’t it? Massive! Colossal!

Feels like we’ve both hit some kind of stride with the kids. There are still exhausting days but in general something’s easier, better, less stressed than ever. Did it really take us ten years to get the hang of parenting? Or is it simply that the boys are a little bit older now, they can read and pour milk and no one ever gets poop on the walls?

Now that I think about it there’s remarkably little poop in our lives right now. At 7 and 10, kids are able to handle all bathroom business discreetly without ever having to bellow “I NEED HELP WIPING.”
I’m not saying that all of our stresses in recent years were feces related, just saying that it didn’t help. And now that we aren’t spending so much time wiping things, we have extra time and energy to put into other things.

You put a lot of that surplus into hanging out with your boys. That’s good because these are the last few years where they won’t think you’re an idiot.

It’s also good because you are amazing at talking to kids this age. You can be stern, but then you can pull back and be sympathetic and then top it all off with a burp joke. You’re the good and the bad cop in one. It’s a skill that even Full House-era Bob Sagat would admire and it’s so important now that we’re out of the “NO don’t put that in your mouth” stage of parenting. Their phases are more complicated now. They need guidance and coping suggestions and humor.

And help using metal detector to find a lost arrow.

They look up to you so much. You’re on their island. The older they get the more they are sure that you are the cool one. That’s okay with me. I have no illusions about my coolness in the eyes of people who think Bear Grills is awesome for climbing mountains and eating bugs.

I know the year wasn’t perfect in grownupville. Moving is always terrible, we had a bunch of expensive stuff happen all at the same time, you work at a job that’s somewhat soul-sucking and exhausting. Your poor, good-hearted old truck finally died. I’m harried and disorganized and building a business is hard. It was a slow year even though it seemed like I was working all the live-long day.

But mostly this is the kind of year that scares me because how dare I have such a perfect life? If I’d been able to put into words everything I hoped the year would be like, this pretty much would be it.

1. We moved into a house architected to represent my brain in physical form. This took a huge leap on your part, and I know if you lived alone you’d be on a little bitty houseboat on a river somewhere. This was a gift entirely for the kids and I.

2. We completed our food chain.

3. We expanded our collection of like minded parents and friends who are fun to hang out with. This is huge. The ultimate introvert family goes social! It’s been really good for all of us.

4. I cooked a lot in my magical kitchen (on my magical Craigslist stove with FOUR working burners), although we still ate out too much. Sorry I love eating out so much. I blame the restaurants for making it feel like a tiny vacation.

5. CANOE! CANOE FOR YOU.

6. On the business front, I took a step back to fix some things. Launched a new website, redesigned flashcard artwork, new shirts, cat books, etc. We set up a bigger office in the dining room and generally got everything organized like I’m a real person with a real company.

7. Your work schedule means you work 13-hour days. That sucks! But then you have days off. That rocks! I know it’s an exhausting work week but it has made it easier to include you in our school stuff and the boys love the heck out of that.

How the universe expands.

How air pressure works.

How science museums trick us into giving them all our money.

8. The boys set up the kind of lab and metalsmithing workshop they’ve always envisioned.

9. We did lots of this

and this

and things like this

I’m told this is a playground for squirrels, who thankfully do not have any knowledge of litigation and liability insurance.

And the boys — look at our boys. WE BUILT THAT. This year they’ve both evened out and we can see who they’re going to be when they each grow up (Spoiler: The same exact people they’ve been since they were born). They have cranky days but at their cores they are both confident, articulate, funny, creative, kind hearted, nurturing guys. They ask sprawling questions, they think and play and invent and test and try and don’t give up.

If you ever doubt your influence, just look at the kind of things they buy with their allowance.

Look at how they take care of each other when one of them is sick, how gentle they are with animals.

Look how hard they work to overcome things like shyness.

Look at what good judges of character they both are. No offense to any of my friends but they did not inherit that from me. I like everyone, even jerks. If the kids they’ve chosen as friends are any indication, man. This next generation is going to be amazing.

So you always ask me “So what’s the plan for today?” and then you get a little exasperated because you don’t care what the plan is, you just want to KNOW what the plan is except that my brain cannot know the plan until it is almost already happening. What’s the plan?

I can scheme. I can brainstorm better than anybody in the competitive brainstorming world. I can spot holes in a heist or suggest strategy and direction.

But when it’s time to work out a plan it’s hard for me to think beyond right now. Most of the time lately I’m plenty happy doing whatever it is we’re already doing. I don’t need much except for you and the boys and a dog and a comfortable couch or front porch. Okay, fast internet. Crushed ice from QT. But that’s it.

This right here, this is the plan. I’m sorry, and thank you, and I love you so damned much.

1. Going in I already can say that it’s medium unlikely that I’ll stay awake long enough to click Publish. That button is really sticky you know, it takes a lot of physical strength to click it. It’s almost three in the morning and I’m an idiot for being awake at all right now.

2. Homeschool! I keep meaning to tell you, there’s a facebook page here
if you’re interested in following what we’re up to.
I don’t keep up with it as much as I should but it’s updated much more often than this blog, that’s for darn sure. Plus there are photos and occasional downloads and stuff.

3. Speaking of school, we’re having a really good year. Technically, that is officially Graham is in first grade this year and Nicolaus is in fourth. But if you ever want to see something hilarious, ask homeschool kids what grade they’re in.

We’re somewhere in the middle of our time together. The kids are now old enough to do projects with more than two steps but still young enough to not realize that doing projects with your mom is lame.

I know there are rigorous academic things that we probably should be doing — I mean we cover academics, but I don’t hammer them. So for now my children are terrible spellers. They write their letters in the most laborious ways possible despite my many brilliant ideas to help them write letters like normal humans. No kidding, we have done dances, written in sand over a light box, used chalk, used every kind of lined/textured/magical paper on earth. They’ll write everything the ideal way as long as we’re doing the exercise, and then five seconds later they’re both back to what is essentially drawing their words.

And math — oh! Some days they know all their math facts just like popcorn popping, and I feel like I should have ribbons and trophies for being so good at this. But other days they confidently shout answers that are so wrong I really wonder why my school hasn’t been shut down by some sort of authorities.

The other night I said something in conversation about evolution and Graham very earnestly asked, “What’s evolution?”

And I immediately killed myself.

We study this every year, and last fall we studied evolution for a month. A MONTH. And we have continued to talk about it and… seriously? You don’t, ugh, agh, kill self.

I started to explain from the beginning then I realized wait. Maybe all he needs? “It’s the process of things evolving.”

“Oh!” he lit up, “Yeah!” Oh thank goodness. I get to live.

So homeschooling is often humbling. And I sigh sometimes thinking about all of the hundreds of amazing conversations and books and museum trips and art projects from the last few years that they completely do not remember. Their brains are little conveyer belts apparently, new stuff goes on, old stuff falls off. That was good stuff, man. Dang it! I have to believe that it all goes in, it’s all rolling around in those brains and it must have shaped who they are in some fundamental way, instilled a love of learning that they’ll carry with them forever. This thought gives me peace.

But by god they’d better remember the stuff we do from here on out.

So that’s the stress of this lifestyle. But oh the good things are so flipping amazing. It’s true that at age 10 if you asked Nicolaus to write a three-page book report, he would melt into a puddle of frustration and disappear, but he is writing a novel and has outlined two others. Lots of world building and character background and thinking about how to start and craft the story. Of course the spelling in the novel is horrifyingly bad like I said. But tonight he ran into the kitchen to tell me that the weirdest thing happened. It turns out that he somehow got a middle-earth fantasy type of spell check dictionary in his brain. He would type a word like half-elf or “dwarf” and KNOW (somehow! magically!) that it was spelled wrong. So he’d change it, trying out a few different spellings until his internal spell checker just KNEW somehow that yes! That’s right!

Oh could it be that reading The Hobbit has secretly planted information in your brain, and that your mother isn’t completely terrible for making you read books even though the world has provided such wonderful audio books?

In other words, every time I start to worry about a skill or experience they’re missing, they do something that makes me realize that they are so getting it. In their own way, on a timetable not created by the state, but it all goes in and mashes together and slowly turns the gears until oh my gosh! Some magic just happened! IN THEIR BRAINS.

Like: We took a long break for the winter and — I feel bad saying this — they didn’t realize we were on a break from school for the first two weeks. They just coasted on their own while I frantically packed orders and did no parenting at all. What are we studying? Packing tape! What’s for lunch? Packing tape, sweetie. Always packing tape.

During the break they continued our (forgettable, apparently) study of evolution on their own. One morning they decided to invent evolution-themed games and let me tell you what, kids’ ideas for games are AWESOME. Parker Brothers should hire a room full of kids to come up with their next game.

Graham’s game involved luck of the draw and scary predators. He made a deck of cards, so it was sort of like Go Fish except you could suffer a circle-of-life tragedy at any time. Highly recommended for parents and teachers who like seeing little children burst into tears.

Nicolaus used a sharpie to draw all different body parts and adaptations onto clear transparencies. Then each player was assigned a character and on your turn you all draw a new body part or change. It’s almost like poker; you were allowed to trade in some of the pieces. You layer them on top of your critter. But every now and then someone would draw an environment card — which changed everything! You were perfectly adapted a minute ago but now poof, the weather’s below freezing for 10,000 years and maybe you’d better do something about that.

After we raved about the evolution games, Nicolaus decided to abandon his dream of being a chemist and announced that we would grow up to be a game designer. He has made 5 or 6 games for us and Graham. So yeah, a lot of their games are too complicated, or too slow or have impossibly tiny game pieces made from q-tip heads colored with markers. Because he wants his prototypes to be playable, he has started caring about crazy things like handwriting and spelling. And figuring out rules for fairness. And probability, math, and all kinds of other big good things for kids to learn like imagining being someone else who doesn’t know how the game works, planning a big project, thinking about pace and timing and what makes a game fun.

4. This did not turn out to be a list of seven things, sorry.

Funny to look back on this now! I hardly ever want to hide under the couch cushions to escape this child. He tells me many times a day how much he loves me. Age seven has been a lovely place in Grahamland. But lest I fail to appreciate the glories of seven, this post was from mid April 2012. It was supposed to be a follow up to this one: http://www.electricboogaloo.net/wordpress/archives/2012/02/16/moppety-moppety-wombat-wayne/
A post which I must point out does not have words in it like kill, murder, strangle or sell in relation to my child. To my credit.
————-

We are having fewer days where Graham tries to test the term “unconditional love” to its limits. And even when he has a day of acting like the Singing Bush, I have to admire his natural comedic timing and talent for fart jokes. He’s really something special when it comes to bathroom humor. I know, I know, every mother thinks that about their child but in my case it’s true.

A few days ago, he told me in a very sweet voice: “Mama, you are very loved.”

“Aw,” I was surprised since he often tells me how much he does not like me because I’m the meanest mother who has ever existed and ever will exist, “That’s so sweet.”

He clarified, grinning but completely deadpan: “Not by ME. But the man you got married to probably loves you…”

He says things like that all the time. His favorite jokes are the kind where you drag out and set up this whole long thing and then get the person in the end. He also likes anti-jokes: Knock knock. Who’s there? A butt. A butt who? YOU SAID BUTT I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT.

and the kind where you pretend to be overly literal. It confuses people sometimes because he’ll order his food, “And I want steamed rice, but not rice that was LITERALLY turned into steam Hahahaha Get it? And I also don’t mean that I want rice that’s steaming now because that would be too hot! Just rice that was cooked by not frying it because I don’t like fried rice. Please.”

So in a noisy restaurant what does the young, childless waiter hear? A little kid’s confusing monolog about rice that seemed to end with the words “fried rice, please.”

One afternoon when the weather was perfect, I threw the boys outside and told them to pretend they were in one of those survivor man shows. All I really meant was don’t come back inside right away because goodness sakes they’re old enough to spend time outside without an adult and they often refuse. BUT they took the assignment seriously. We’re SURVIVER-MEN. They immediately started pretending that their very survival was on the line.

I checked on them fifteen minutes later (I want them to learn independence but let’s not go insane with the free-range kid business). They were hard at work preparing for OOS (Outdoor Orphan Survival). Nicolaus had constructed a working bow and was experimenting with different arrow shapes and sizes. He was gathering wild onions and strawberries which we have instead of grass. It’s a rental.

Meanwhile Graham… Well. Okay. This is what I’m talking about with this young man’s brain. Graham was set up on the driveway with a ukulele and bongo drums. He played open chords with his hands, played the drums with his feet. When he saw me watching from the porch he paused to demand tips from me. “And no imaginary invisible money is allowed!”

Which of these kids is better prepared to survive out there? I don’t know. But Graham’s approach is very similar to the survival skills that my youngest brother still uses, except he sometimes does let people pay him with invisible money. And he’s doing okay.

So yeah. It’s getting easier, whatever crazed Daffy Duck relative had invaded Graham’s brain over the last year seems to be relaxing its grip a little. The other night he asked us to take him to the park even though it was dark, cold, raining, and only 10 minutes till we needed to leave to go somewhere. I felt a tantrum welling up so I said “hey! I’m at the park right now! Want to go down the slide with me?”

That business would NEVER fly with the Graham from last summer. But he stopped. Something shifted… and he jumped into a long, detailed, very weird narration game about us being at a playground in our living room. It was a weird playground, he’d say things like “ohhhh nooo I forgot to tell you there is extra gravity over there so you are going to slide down that slide extra fast haha watch out!” Or “You got me going almost the speed of light on this spin-around-thing and there’s no friction so I will never ever stop!”

“Or oh sorry, I can’t play tag with you because I’m on the swings right now and I might be somewhere where time is going too slow, I’m not sure but anyway I don’t think tag will work when time is like that.”

So yeah. Still bumpy, every phase ends in fits and starts but I’m thinking we might keep him after all.

The other night I forgot to take my Zoloft. Weird zappy-head sensations, intense dreams I can only describe as thick, and in the early morning hours a bonus migraine which thankfully I mostly slept through.

Which, if you’re ever bored of how boring your dreams are, I recommend starting on Zoloft and then every now and then either forget a dose or accidentally take double. Oh the next day will suck a little bit, or maybe a lot, but! You will have amazing, crazy and deeply rich dreams. Not the when you wish upon a star kind. If your when you wish upon a star dreams are boring I don’t know what to tell you. Watch more exciting TV shows maybe?

Anyway, the zoloft thing wombled up my whole week’s sleep. And there are female things — certain times if you must know — that happen and they’re unpleasant and that makes me grumpy.

I promise this will not be graphic but I have to say it is an outrage that women deal with this business so often. If it were a rare thing that affected one in a thousand women, it would be described as a life-ruining disease that must be cured. We sufferers would go on talk shows and sob about how much of our lives we spend dealing with this horrifying and often embarrassing condition. And we’d have charity walks! I mean, not ME. I wouldn’t participate in walks because I have cramps and because I’d be fairly likely to have an embarrassing feminine product failure and (perhaps mainly) because charity things always start at like 7:30 in the morning, but other good people would be raising awareness and racing for the CURE for this devastating ailment.

Anyway so that has me grumpy.

And the house is so messy. So so so so messy. I had it so clean! And then a huge new batch of flashcards arrived and we started collating them in the living room and Nicolaus made a board game and set it up in the middle of everything and I accidentally joined Amazon Prime which is basically a cardboard box subscription run by the recycling cartel and our recycling didn’t get picked up last week so the bin is crammed full and so now all of that is piled up everywhere.

Then I got the idea to go through the boys’ old clothes and toys and get rid of stuff. Yay! Look! I’m cleaning! I put all of the “probably get rid of” stuff in my office. Pulling things out of closets and going through them and piling them up FEELS like cleaning but really it is the opposite of cleaning.

What else… oh! The boys discovered stop motion animation. Which I am not complaining about! Because stop motion animation is amazing and because it only took them five minutes to figure out how to make it look like their characters were eating each other and then pooping each other out so strong is their talent. But the modeling clay and whole setup took over the dining room table.

Which led to us eating meals on the couch. Which led to more messes.

Which led to me surrendering the kitchen to the mess until I had to order pizza. Which led to more flipping cardboard to recycle even though the massive bin IS FULL and there’s already a mountain of recycling waiting politely by the door.

That’s why I said yes! Totally! when our neighbor invited us to join her yardsale. PERFECT. People will buy things, things will go away, clear that space in my office, then recycling and flash cards can go into my office, then we’ll have our living room back and maybe N will move his game and then we can put the clay animation project on the gaming table, and that will allow us to have the dining room table back and the kitchen nicer to be in. See how it works? This could be a whole article in Real Simple or some shit.

So we did the garage sale. In two days we sold $59 worth of stuff which is impressive until you know that one of the items we sold went for $50. So. Yeah. And then! Nicolaus bargained his way into an ipod and a big comfy chair.

The ipod turned out to be a fake, so now we have a little extra-difficult-to-use FM radio. And the chair is hideous, though I have to admit very comfortable. Which is all nice and everything except that the house is still a giant jumbled up wreck.

I’m going to tag this entry Spring Cleaning so maybe you will search for Best Spring Cleaning Tips and find this and read it and feel better because no matter how bad you are at Spring cleaning and how much you think you need helpful easy spring clean housekeeping organize tips, you can’t have their act any more not together than me.

Honeyfern is an accredited little pocket of pedagogical bliss outside of Atlanta. Project based, warm and brilliant and full of muchness. Last month, the founder Suzanne fell off a cliff. You can read about it here . Spoiler: and then all of a sudden, her husband died.

Just like that their twelve year old daughter was sobbing and trying to understand this new world where nothing is for sure, the very sidewalk might fall out from under you any time, and no amount of nice safe parks and convenient Hobby Lobbies and chain restaurants can keep it from happening. It could’ve happened anywhere, in any kind of childhood, in any size town. But here even here? We live in a bubble! This is an outrage. What do we even live here for if we can’t ban things like this from happening? We have home owner’s associations for everything out here and it really seems like deadly car crashes is something they’d work on.

So yeah, like I said maybe kids who experience hardship turn out stronger, richer in character. But counter to that point, screw that. Cicily should have her dad back.

I don’t want my kids to feel unsafe or ashamed, like ever; those are the kinds of things that change who you are down to your DNA. But I also wouldn’t want them to be devastated by something like this because my goodness.

When we talk about how stress builds character, what is that? What does character even mean? We want kids to grow up to be compassionate and resilient and adaptable. We want them to be able to solve new problems, to have original insights. That’s the stuff of character, the texture of a healthy, fully-formed human mind.

Of course we can’t and shouldn’t protect them from every sad or difficult thing that might ever happen, but like someone said in the comments — there’s no reason to go looking for trouble either. Are suburbia’s rubber-padded playgrounds too safe? Maybe. But there’s a difference between challenges and trauma, and we don’t need to add alligators just for the sake of alligators.