Graham, meanwhile, is a kitty. I just thought you should know.

Today the kitty announced that this was a happy day, partly because of a rule we have: any time I get a new wholesale account OR a bit of press, the boys each get a donut from Krispy Kreme. Thanks to this article, for which I was interviewed whilst on a good bit of cold medicine, Graham and Nicolaus scored a donut today and so oh! happy day. We also spent a good bit of the afternoon playing outside during a short break between tornado watches. There were some great puddles to splash in, great enough to ignore the threat of having to go inside, the threat of having all of their toys taken away, the threat of big enormous unending timeouts. They expressed zero remorse as I marched them with their muddy sandals and cold, soaked feet back inside. Totally worth it.

Now there are some photographs.

Shit. I can’t find my card reader. Tomorrow there will be photographs.

Nicolaus was annoyed that politicians weren’t being funny or interesting anymore. Obama shifted from Mr.Heyyyy look at me vote for me I’m cool! to Mr. Alright I have work to do. We watch the president’s speeches while Nicolaus rolls his eyes and gripes: “Why are we watching this? Where are the debates? Why can’t Obama still take time out to go up on stage and argue with people who don’t like him very much? Because that was so funny. This is boring. I should have voted for McCain.”

At the tender age of five and seven-eighths, he announced that he was finished with politics.

But a few weeks ago he overheard something about bank bailouts and the resulting populist outrage. Nicolaus loves four things in life: birds, eating straight raw sugar, building stuff, and populist rage. If it were up to him, we would violently overthrow our government every few months just to keep senators on their toes. Then we’d all be given trained parrots who would sit on our shoulders and feed us giant spoonfuls of sugar while we stood at our workbenches building cool weapons for the next coup.

Armed with a six-year-old’s understanding of what the hell happened to our economy over the last year, which is only a little bit simpler than my own understanding of what the hell happened to our economy over the last year, he began to work on the best way to deal with the banks. His first idea was that everyone should pull their money out of every bank. We talked about the problems with that, and he was fascinated to learn that our bank does not actually store our exact dollar bills for us in a safe. He processed this for a few days, and by next time I went to make a deposit he had come to the conclusion that the issue is trust. We must really need to trust the banks not to just be robbers if we are going to let them use our money for stuff like that. And if we can’t trust them now or if it turns out that they are actually bad guys — well, then what are we even doing?

And, he decided, that must be why our bank has those huge Greek columns out front. That way their building will look like something old and so we’ll think oh wow, it’s been here since the Greek times, they must be really good at being a bank. Which is silly because haha, were the Greeks ever over here building banks? Haha! Get it?

Yes, I get it. A rhetorical analysis of the persuasive nature of architectural details, very funny, now please stop kicking the back of my seat and you know what a lot of kids ask when they go to the bank? They ask about LOLLY POPS. Which, no you can’t have one, because last time you acted insane and whiney and awful and I told you that next time we wouldn’t get lolly pops, but that isn’t the point.

So he was bummed that we refused to withdraw all of our money right then.

A few weeks later he was running around our living room being one of the Space Chimps. He interrupted his zipping around with a rocket pack to ask me WHY Obama keeps giving the banks more money. And WHY are the giant banks allowed to keep on making people trust them even though they took people’s money and gambled it away and then partied with government bailout money? I told him that it’s complicated and that a lot of grownups are asking the same thing. So his next idea was that we should go to our bank and hold up a big sign so everyone who comes there will see it and realize oh no! We shouldn’t trust this bank!

I told him oh! People do that. That’s called a protest.

Oooooooh he truly loved hearing about protests. It warmed his tiny heart to know that through history people have protested things and he announced with certainty that someday he would lead a BIG protest about something. Starting with: a protest against the banks! That’s what our family needs to do.

I showed him photos of the recent London bank protests while he bounced on the couch beside me, full of freaky amounts of glee over the pictures of people with noses bloodied by policemen in riot gear and people throwing things into the bank’s windows. “Yeah! Just like that! Only we won’t throw anything into the window like that because you know, the glass might hurt Lovie. She would want to protest too, and she’d be sitting on my shoulder so the glass could hurt her.”

Yesterday he saw protesters outside the post office with signs that said “HONK if you hate paying taxes!” and made me honk for them. What are they protesting? Where do you think they got the wood to make those signs? Is it legal to protest like that? Do they stand there all day? And so on.

He started to spin up into his own newest protest idea. He quickly got Graham on board and spent the evening pressuring me to join them.

“We need a grownup to come. You have to help us. It’s going to be — well, I don’t think it’s going to be totally legal.”

“Is it going to be violent?”

“No. Not violent — will you do it with us? We really need you because we can’t drive.”

“I can drive Nicoliss! I know how to drive to the bank even without any grownup helping me!”

“No Graham, that’s illegal. Even though they can’t put kids in jail we still don’t want the police to get us and bring us back home. We need to convince Mama or Daddy to do this with us. Okay?”

“Okay. But I want to also be the one who throws the poop by myself.”

“Yes. Definitely. I will hold the signs while you do that.”

“And also I’m going to tinkle.”

“Good. Mama? Are you with us?”

“Um. What…”

“We are going to SCARE the banks into giving back everyone’s money and saying they are sorry for messing up the economy. And we are going to mess up their building and their sign so nobody will want to bring their money there.”

I must have looked unconvinced. He grabbed a piece of paper out of my printer and sketched this quick plan:

Forgive the crummy scan. All of the Xs and splotches are giant blobs of poop which was thrown at the bank in an effort to reduce their credibility in the eyes of the public. What he actually said was “People will start to come there and see the fancy columns and the BANK sign all covered in poop and be like What? Can I trust this bank? No way am I giving them my money!”

The guy in the middle is Nicolaus, holding a sign in one hand that says “YOO STINC” (sic) – witty because with the addition of poop they now literally do stink – and a sword in the other to show off and try to scare the bank people.

The three things on the ground next to him are barrels of poop. Pretty obvious.

The person in the bottom right is Graham. He is peeing in a straight line up the side of the bank, and lifting one leg so as to make more poop for the project.

I have never been more proud.

So this was going to be a post about how funny it is that even though my kid wants to sound very grownuppish, his solutions are obviously unworkable and childish. The absurdity and unworkability of his protest ideas was going to be the punchline. But then Kevin showed me this in the news today:

Protesters Stage Tax Day Crap Session on the Steps of the IRS Building

A group of at least 30 protesters dropped their pants and defecated on the steps of the IRS building in Washington D.C. today in an apparent protest of the US policy to bailout large financial institutions. Onlookers who witnessed the event said that it took only about 30 seconds to complete and was carried out with military like precision.

Most participants appeared to be men and quickly disappeared on foot and into awaiting vehicles at the scene. Witnesses describe them as wearing regular clothes with no marking or slogans of any kind. Minutes after the protest firefighters arrived to remove the neat and uniformly spaced piles of feces from the steps and it quickly became business as usual at the scene with no arrests being made.

Now I can’t find any legitimate news sources who are reporting this, but still. You believed it for a second, right? Yeahhh. Watch out, establishment. You are in big trouble as soon as my kid can legally drive.

Well the early-waking mostly failed. I woke up at 8:30, then thirty minutes later fell back asleep until 10:00. At 10:30 I woke everyone else up. Sounds late but I’m not kidding, the schedule here is fucked. It was an early morning for them.

The day was long and sleepy and full of Grahamtrums. But I fought the temptation to nap, and instead made a list of mission-critical junk that HAD to get done. And then! This is the crazy part: I did all of the things. Except for going to the bank, I didn’t do that, but Nicolaus thinks we shouldn’t put our money in banks anymore. He is hoping for a revolution against banks because revolutions are his favorite kind of war. Civil wars are the funniest kind, he says. Invasions aren’t that funny, unless they lead somehow to a revolution that turns into a civil war. Then he thinks it is funny.

Six year olds don’t always make sense. I’m just reporting what I’ve been told.

So we got all of the orders packed up, and I invoiced people who owe me money, and I made boring grownuppish logistical phone calls and went to the post office and the pharmacy and washed towels because I am pretty sure I heard Kevin mutter “One day I am going to murder someone…” this morning as he went to take a shower and had to root around for clean towels like a squirrel looking for the stuff he buried months ago. He said it cheerfully, not in a murderous rage kind of way, but still. Maybe towels would be good to have. As his wife I have this almost supernatural sense for what he needs. So I washed the towels and even remembered to put them in the drying thing before they started to stink.

Anything I do to help the environment is undone by having to wash everything twice.

In my flurry of stuff-doing I noticed that my children were making their own lunch without even mentioning my oversight. First they made bowls of oat bran cereal with milk and raw sugar mixed in. Then they figured out that the sugar was the good part and switched to making sugar sandwiches. I should have intervened but you know what? It was whole wheat bread with no junk in it. There are certainly worse lunches. Like ones that I have to prepare! No I mean. They could have eaten Oreos with Runts in the middle.

We zoomed around town and got everything done, plowed through Graham’s exhaustion to make it to a decent bedtime. He was asleep by 10pm. He changed out of his pajamas and ended up falling asleep wearing only a sparkly red cape wrapped around his neck and a plastic knight’s helmet over his face, but still. Asleep. Or passed out from lack of oxygen but either way! Success!

But it is now 1:48 in the morning and I am still awake and Kevin is still awake and Nicolaus is still awake. He’s in his bed at least, but I can hear him in there talking to himself and maybe plotting a revolution.

If we offered him food, drinks, hugs, attention, toys, milkshakes, and/or movies about talking dogs he would either close his hot little eyes and shake his head no. If we were really pushy he would whisper, “I want everyone to leave me completely alone.”

Nicolaus has never wanted us to leave him completely alone in his life. Who would he talk to if he was completely alone? It makes no sense.

We made it into the clinic right before they closed. He was outraged by the sudden invasion of the strep test and told the nice lady in a tearful whisper that excuse me, but people don’t really like when you just jab things down their throats and almost choke them. She apologized, he accepted but kept a damned close eye on her.

The test came back almost immediately. Strep dang throat.

Which! If you ever need a babysitter I highly recommend strep throat. Your child will lay down next to you and not only will he NOT ask for anything, he will in fact insist that you leave him completely alone.

The sitter leaves once you start antibiotics though; this morning he woke up chatting and being silly and ate an entire piece of toast, and now is building alien castles with blocks and using masking tape to hold it all together before Graham can knock it down.

Will we all get strep too? Will Graham escape? Stay tuned for the exciting adventures of Infectious the Speckled Boy!

Oh my god I hope I don’t get it.