Nicolaus is spotty. It started around his waist – so we wrongly suspected and accused the corduroy pants of doing this – but then it wicked its way up his stomach to his chest and around his back. By the time we got to the doctor his face and arms and legs and feet were all dotted with lacy little red marks.

He’s fine. It’s a virus, is all. His fever comes and goes and he’s being the sweet wonderful creature we always meet whenever he has a fever, the creature who is so pathetic and loving that it makes me want to give him sweet tarts in place of chewable tylenol. He won’t let me call him “my speckled child” or even Speck for short. It’s a bummer.

His invention ideas for this week:
1. A tiny portable humidifier that you charge all day, then snuggle with at night.
2. A kind of toolbelt device for pediatricians to use, so they don’t have to have so many buttons and tools and everything in their examination rooms. This way they could just come out to the waiting room and examine all the kids while they keep watching Beauty and the Beast on the little TV.

Dang it, there were tons more but now I can’t remember them.

Graham has a cold too, plus a cough and a serious attitude problem. His new habit is name calling; he sometimes doesn’t realize he’s doing it until it’s too late and he’s headed to the naughty chair for a time out, where he yells and protests the entire time and sometimes calls me poopface and then cannot believe that I start the timer over.

They got it from Flight of the Navigator which is still the single greatest movie ever made, but really? The brothers had to call each other buttface? It was the olden days I guess, before children’s movies were at all appropriate for children.

When Graham calls his brother names, it usually starts out as joking then turns ugly.

“You’re a funny head.”

“Plop head!”

“Stinky face!”

“Name caller!”

“CAR ALARM.”

“What?”

“CAR ALARM.”

“Well, you’re a car full of poop.”

“POOPY PLOP CAR ALARM HEAD!!”

The other day I was trying to call around and find a vet in our area who would neuter Roux without A) charging $350 or B) being rude or unhelpful on the phone, but it was impossible because Graham kept picking weird fights with his brother. So I sent the boys to their room to play. I built you a spaceship! Go play!

Nicolaus took the bird and went up to the top bunk. From the living room, I heard Graham hollering: “COME DOWN HERE AND HUG ME. Or you will DIE!!!”

And when that mysteriously didn’t make Nicolaus come down and play with him he said, “Look! This is my saw! And this is your head! Sigga-sawga-sigga-sawga. I cut your head up flat. FLATHEAD!!”

He really is a very sweet boy, I promise. Sometimes when he blurts out a rude name, he quickly tries to reel it back in: “You flopface! Uh… But. Flopface is a good thing to be. It means you are NICE. People like to be called flopface.”

Last night he tried: “SKUNKhead. Uh! Skunkhead is a very good artist. He was a famous good artists who can’t write. And? It’s good to be like him! And that’s why people like when people call them Skunkhead.”

Maybe I should try this on Nicolaus? “No, sweetie. It’s good to be speckled. That’s why kids love it when their mama calls them Speck.” Though man. I just glanced over at his spotty, fevered, pouty face and decided that no. I should not try this on him now. Wait till the alleged tylenol kicks in.

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!

Nicolaus is…
1. Suddenly scared to read. He doesn’t want to mess up, and the letter Y is an impish and fickle whore. Sometimes Y says yuh. Yellow. Yuck. Got it. And sometimes it says Eeeeee: Tiffanyyyee, Funneeeeeey. And then sometimes with no warning, it sounds like the NAME of the letter I: By, try, my. What in the fucking fuck?

There is no reliable rule and so he’s having to use context to figure it out, and he’s not one bit happy about that. It sucks to be six.

2. Actively working to not be a jerk. This is huge, you guys. Because for several weeks he was actively working on seeing if he could push us until we finally divorced in the hopes that in the course of the custody battle he might get lost in the system somewhere. Is that bad to say on the internet? Because I don’t mean that we wanted him to go away forever. I assume that it would all be sorted out and we’d get him back to us at some point, but by then things would be better because he’d be a humble Nicolaus. An Oh-Mother-I-am-glad-to-see-you Nicolaus. A maybe-I-won’t-berate-you-for-giving-me-the-incorrect-beverage Nicolaus.

But that’s all gone now, he’s back from whatever black-tights-wearing, Morrissey-listening, hate-everyone place he was visiting. He’s trying hard to reel in his many daily accusations. He’s trying to let things go, roll with the unexpected things that might happen when your mom kinda sucks at doing stuff. He’s been helpful and mostly sweet and relatively easygoing, his old chatty and energetic self.

And he’s only fallen out of his chair during a meal twice since Sunday. That, my friends, is progress.

3. Worried about the statue of liberty. He said so tonight, in the middle of talking about nothing at all to do with the statue of liberty: “I’m very worried about the Statue of Liberty.”

He heard awhile back that a lot of people want to keep immigrants out (there is lovely graffiti to that effect all over the buzzing metropolis where we live), and since the Statue of Liberty is there to welcome those teeming masses, he is concerned that we may at some point need to tear it down. And that makes him sad. Because he really likes the Statue of Liberty. I mean, she’s no firstaid kit, but still.

4. In love with his bird. And she returns his love. I’m not kidding you, it’s freaky how much those two like each other. The second she hears his voice in the morning she demands to be uncovered, and if he plays in another room without her – there is hell to pay.

I secretly think she might be a boy bird, but who am I to judge? Once you get past the species thing and the underage problem and the obvious challenges presented by differences in size and expected lifespan, really gayness is the absolute least of your concerns.

5. Has devised his own stimulus plan. He says that Barack Obama should use all of that money to go shopping at stores. He should buy billions of dollars worth of stuff that people need. Then he should donate that stuff to thrift stores around the country.

The stores get business. People get stuff they need really cheap. And Obama would get a sweet write off on his taxes this year. Okay that last reason was mine but yeah: win, win, win.

6. Has invented three things for Roo/oux the space puppy. The first is for when he’s scared of someone. It is a large fabric ghost attached to a spring-type of wire. We would attach it to a harness and spring-load it for him before each walk. When the dog growls at something or someone, the vibrations from the growl would cause the ghost to spring out. BOO!! And would scare away the bigger dog or person or whatever.

Hell, I want one. Except mine would say, “No THANK YOU I don’t want to go to your church!!”

The second invention is pure sweetness. He noticed that the puppy loves to be scratched under his collar. So he wants help making a collar with little nubs all around the inside, so it would scratch his neck as he walked around all day.

The third invention is a device that would detect when the dog is whining while we are away, so it could squirt him with a water pistol. Not as loving as the first two, but I’d totally buy one if they had them at petsmart.

7. So, so awesome when he’s not being a moody punk. Is there a frilly font I can write that in? So awesome. He wants me to buy him some glitter so he can paint a picture of what a car window looks like from the inside at night when we’re driving in the rain. Today he spilled some honey on the table and joyfully declared that a drop of any! liquid! works as a lens. I don’t know if that’s technically true or not, need to check, but OMG I’m not even explaining it right. His sweet little brain never shuts up, and there’s a rhythm to it when he’s in a good mood. He announces things like popcorn right at two minutes in the microwave: boom boom boom boomboompoppop pop! Pop! Pop! Oh and… … POP!

I like this week so far.

Did you know that “Birds are great” is not a birthday theme that generates high enough demand to warrant the attention of the makers of cups, napkins, balloons, plates, pinatas, and/or cute oversized cardboard cutouts? I was as shocked as you are. That didn’t stop me from spending too much on party supplies, but when I got home it took a lot of work to force the party into the general bird shape that Nicolaus wanted. But like with the halloween costumes, I reminded myself that I don’t have to make this worthy of a magazine. It doesn’t even have to be recognizable to adults. All I have to do is blow the mind of a six year old who doesn’t have access to a television and has no idea what serious birthday parties are like.

So! Scrapbook paper on the front door that said “Welcome to the BIRD SANCTUARY.”
Cut out paper birds taped all over the place.
Streamers streamed about.
Cupcakes with bird pictures sticking out of them.
Beautiful and realistic speckled plastic eggs – hooray for the insanely early commercialization of Easter!
Many fake birds from the floral department
Tiny wooden bird houses for the kids to paint
Little wooden bird puzzles
Like a thousand glow sticks because of awesome.

When it was time for the party, Kevin went and got four pizzas and several liters of generic beverages while I threw all of our piles of clutter into our bedroom, closed the door, and put our least annoying soundtrack of birds in the rainforest on the CD player. Guests arrived. We ate pizza. Lit candles. Sang happy birthday. Presents.

Then he skipped off to his room to play with the other kids, leaving the adults to sit in the living room and visit and wonder why we thought the kids would want to paint birdhouses or play games or do anything other than play noisy screaming games in the bedroom. And also – why are we in here by ourselves listening to a danged sounds of nature CD?

But it was a great time. Nicolaus spent the hours afterward in a kind of gooey appreciative daze. He and Graham slept until nearly noon the next day. Sunday was the closest to hung over I’ve ever seen these two; my god they were grumpy. This is where my dad would say, “No. Hitler was grumpy. They were downright ornery.”

But a good day of bike riding and a good night’s sleep seemed to even him out a little. I mean, how can he sustain grumpiness in the face of such blatant awesomeness? The kid has never seen this many presents in his life. Over the course of the week he acquired:
A digital camera from my parents
A mini-workshop tool from us
A bike from my sister in law & co. It was my nephew’s but he barely rode it — it looks brand new. It’s exactly what Nicolaus has been wanting for months.
A large flip-chart of the human body, which Graham is trying hard to claim for his own.
A four-headed plastic dragon, very fierce
This jellyfish aquarium, which he loves with all of his jellyfish-loving heart. He is very upset that we will not let him bring it everywhere with him. I had no idea that he even liked jellyfish, but it turns out that jellyfish – even fake ones – have personalities and feelings that I am wrong to dismiss lightly.
A $50 use-anywhere gift card from Kevin’s parents.

So tonight I took him to spend the $50. We drove to a nearby suburb which has every lame suburbia chain store crammed right together, all on one road. This made his shopping spree very efficient; in less than an hour he bought a harmonica, a pop-gun for Graham, a dreidel, a manly purse for his camera, a bag of chocolate eyeballs, a fork, a spoon, a butter knife, a tiny red ceramic teacup, a flip-fish game, a plastic light-up heart shaped dog tag which he is pretending is a magic stone, two squirt guns, an assortment of interesting polished rocks, an invisible ink pen that came with a locking journal, and a bell for his bicycle.

Even though he was unfairly denied his right to spend his money on the one thing every young child should own (this) he deftly honed in on $47 worth of things that sum up the importance of being Nicolaus and the fun of being six. And even though I’ve resisted any sort of gun toys for the last six years, I am quite looking forward to tomorrow’s squirt gun fight. Of which I will be the winner! Which sums up the fun of being thirty-five.

first I was 1
When I was one, I ate out of a thousand bottles

then I was 2
and I fixed Daddy’s truck

when I was 3
I helped Baba with his shop

when I was 4
I moved to Georgia
and helped animals

when I was 5
I helped Mama go to the post office

And now I’m six
and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but so far I play with my bird!