Nicolaus is in love with Mary Poppins. Not the movie but the actual lady herself, Mary Poppins. It’s that bag. How does she do that? We only saw 20 minutes of the movie and my goodness he spent the rest of the evening pretending to pull large things out of very small containers. Every time I acted amazed. Holy moly! How did you — wha?? He’s a witch!! Kill him!

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.

Written at 2 in the morning. Posted today because I fell asleep before clicking publish.

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.

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!

If I say a terrible thing like, “No, you can’t have any candy right now…” he climbs on the couch next to me and flops around and sighs dramatically and kicks and hits me but very gently, so that it takes me a minute to even realize what he’s doing. If I ignore his obvious outrage, he points at me and yells “EXIT!!!”

What?

He wants me to exit. Because of what I said.

And lately whenever Nicolaus makes him mad I hear Graham scream, “YOU’RE FIRED, Nicolaus! You are BELIEVED OF DUTY.”

He means relieved. And for whatever reason, that makes Nicolaus cry.