I know we live in a first world country and are therefore pampered every minute of our silly lives, but relative to most of our days: today was crappy.

I’m too tired to detail it, and I want to wake up early tomorrow so we can refresh the week by having waffles or something but just believe me. There was griping and rushing and yelling and spilling and peeing and loading heavy things and embarrassing and driving and a social kind of multitasking that needs a word… the kind where you are trying to have a conversation with adults you don’t know well and are also talking to your kids like a crazy person. There was cold weather, there was a kid who hates jackets, there was a guy at the post office who yelled at the kid for not wearing a damned jacket. There was another, smaller kid, whose face is all red from having a cold and it makes everyone feel sorry for him and everyone thinks I’m a bad mom for taking him out on a cold day when he’s obviously level 10 sick. Even though really he’s only level 2 sick, but they don’t know that because he looks awful.

I said I wasn’t going to give you all the details but that’s the thing. I didn’t.

The day ended with Graham throwing a level 98 tantrum because I made him get off the potty. Remember his creative poop interpretation? He’s taken it to the next logical level, which is – oh god, this is what people mean when they say that mommybloggers are abusive just for posting what they do because of one day – artistic planning and creation. The realization that his own mother doesn’t understand that when a kid says he needs two more poops to come out, it isn’t some kind of base physical need for a bowel movement. It is a creation in the postmodern deconstructive tradition of ephemeral art, to be admired briefly before it is flushed away, in the words of the artist, “to the ocean.”

So yeah. He was trying to make the shape of a castle and needed two more poops for the towers. He wanted to sit there and wait for his body to digest dinner I guess? I don’t know, but I really needed the day to be over.

I picked him up, got him cleaned up and ready for bed. We had what my dad calls a lively exchange of ideas over this outrage, and then he went to sleep. And now, me too. More after the jump sleep.

All of this talk about peanut butter in the news is making me crave peanut butter candy, cookies, and other junk. It’s pretty mean. The media knows how easily influenced we are.

Today was one of those days where I feel like a mama possum. Do a quick Google image search if you need a visual – we were just like that except the baby possums would have a laptop in their tiny paws. The boys did not achieve simul-Savage voices; bummer. But they did both reach maximum pathetic misery this afternoon and I tell you what. It was sad. It was a long, weird pathetic day where I got almost nothing done… Nicolaus was sad because it hurt to talk but he wanted to talk, so he talked and then his throat hurt, which made him sad, which he told me about. Meanwhile Graham tried to play with bristle blocks and cried when they didn’t stick together the way he wanted them to. I suggested that he do something else, but he said “But when I’m sick, the only thing that makes me feel better is building. And watching Shrek number one on your computer. And medicine. That’s all that makes me feel better.”

I can’t wait till my kids are old enough to see The Jerk so they’ll get why we laugh whenever they do that.

So the three of us piled up on the couch and watched Shrek number one on the internet. My poor children don’t know that movies aren’t supposed to have Chinese subtitles, but hey! This is a good age to expose them to other languages, right?

Shrek is a better movie than I remember. Good music, characters are funny but not aggressive and obnoxious, and they don’t dwell on the inappropriate stuff – just quickly say the word “butt” and move on.

Nicolaus watched it intently and was very curious about the whole true love theme. We’ve been reading fairy tales lately, and he’s been paying close attention to marriage and love in general. One morning last week he came in and said, “I’ve noticed something funny. When people get married, it’s almost like they think that the other person they’re marrying? Is like the king or the queen of the whole world. After they get married, they just always treat them that way, like they are seriously that important. But that’s so ridiculous! It’s so funny! Because – lots of other people probably got married on that same day, so? How can there be more than one king of the whole world?”

Tonight when Shrek was over, he stood up and said, “I think there might be something wrong with my body. Because it doesn’t know how much it could ever love a person.”

What?

He explained that like – Fiona and Shrek fell totally in love like that, and the dragon and the donkey did too, and it’s a little bit like how much he loves Lovie but not really. And he knows he loves all of us a lot, BUT. There’s something different about that kind of love and there’s something wrong with his body because he doesn’t have that or know how far his love for another person could every go – you know?

I’m paraphrasing because it took a few tries before I figured out that he was talking about romantic love, and that he was worried that he doesn’t feel anything like that or cant’ even imagine what it feels like. So — how’s this for a Full House ending moment? — I explained that oh! See, there are chemicals in grownup brains that make that kind of love work, and kids don’t have those yet. This explanation either made him feel much better or made him realize that I totally wasn’t getting it; either way he dropped it.

Giveaway winner tomorrow. You guys rock. Thank you. I still believe/hope that this is all a matter of silly wording and the law will be re-interpreted or clarified in a way that makes sense. I’m not sure that it’ll happen before February 10, but you never know.

Good news today from the lab that will be testing my products: Because of the nature of my designs, there’s no way to test each color of ink separately. The law requires each component to be tested – which normally means every color of ink – but my work blends the colors a lot and then has a gloss coating on top, so they have to treat it as one component.

So where I was thinking each print or set of flash cards was going to cost $500 to certify, it looks like it’ll be less than half of that.

Which is good because I messed up and forgot to pay my Discover card. They didn’t send my statements for three months, then yesterday I got all three statements in the mail PLUS two late notices. All arrived on the same day. I spent ten minutes tried to figure out how that can happen, and decided to file it under mystifying things that happen to grownups. Rather than think about it very hard, I’m going to use the money I had set aside for multi-component testing to pay off the stupid credit card. Which is perfect, because the money that’s charged on there was all printing of Nerdy Baby ABCs so there’s some kind of symmetry in there somewhere.

In non-boringlogistical news, my children are gross. We’re on the verge of banning Mitten Hand. Totally cute game has now turned into this:

“Hi I’m Mitten Hand. Please give me some candy. And if I don’t like it, I am going to probably throw up all over your hair.” This is Graham talking! Which hooray for syllables and everything but sweet little Graham?

“Okay, here you go!”

“Thank you.” Mitten Hand chews thoughtfully, pauses to consider the texture and flavor of the invisible candy, “Hmmm. I’m not sure I like this candy very much — BLAAAUUUUURRRRRGH HAHAHA HE THREW UP ALL OVER YOUR HAIR.”

“HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA Mitten Hand!”

“Hi. I’m Mitten Hand and you’d better give me a different kind of candy. And if I don’t like it I will throw up in your mouth.”

“Here you go!”

“BLEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH”

The harder I try to ignore it, the worse it gets. Eventually poop and tinkle get involved and boogers and everything horrible they can think of until they’re laughing so hard they can’t breathe and are being so loud and so gross that I finally tell them to stop, only they can’t hear me because they’re laughing and their hands are puking everywhere and oh my god.

My brain is better, I think. Of course – where am I getting this information? So it’s hard to say for sure, but the people around me seem less irritable and more at ease with me being awake, so I’m going to take that as a good sign.

Side effects so far: dreams are not as detailed and interesting as usual. Though I think I did dream something very funny about an old man who came to the present from 1,000 years in the past via time travel, but it was confusing see because he looked so old. People thought he meant that he was a thousand years old and it was very funny in a Three’s Company way to watch him try to explain that he’s only 90-something, even though – sigh, yes, well he was born some thousand years ago but that’s not how it works and – oh nevermind.

But the texture of my dreams is normally a lot more interesting and fun. These are sort of like watching a movie while half asleep.

Other side effect: Is there a word that means “full of words”? I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel very… wordy. If I actually posted everything here that I want to post right now, you’d all run away for good. And how!

So I won’t.

So. How’s it going? Anything… good on the internet?

Graham was in a horrible mood today which – please forgive me – is almost entertaining. He wants so bad to be awful, to tell us all to fuck off, to throw the tantrums his brain is demanding. But part of him likes us, and is embarrassed, and wants a hug, and wants to tell us a joke. He was howling and furious because he couldn’t cut. It is his right to cut, and he is very good at cutting, and he wanted to cut and I – an unreasonable whore of a mother – was saying no. So we faced off.

“Graham. Put the scissors down and stop throwing a fit. If you don’t stop it, you will go to your room.”

He stood, old-western style and stared at me, deciding what to do. His face quickly morphed from one expression to the next. He scowled… then melted into sad. Then shifted to an angry pout. Then – a tiny twitch of a smile? Back to scowl. Then a flash smile. Then hurt. Outrage! Half a smile followed by a look of total confusion.

He needed help. I scooped him up and gently took the scissors, swirled him around and changed the subject. We moved on, until the next human rights violation occurred four minutes later. Dinner was announced, and he wanted to eat but also wanted to bring his paper boat to the table but we didn’t hear him so we said just come and eat, and he thought that meant no you can’t bring your lousy boat to the fucking table, so he howled and we told him to quit it and

I’m doing it, aren’t I? I told you. It’s a problem. Maybe there’s a wordpress plugin that will auto-cut a third of what I write.

When he messes up, he hides his eyes. It’s should be infuriating that this otherwise capable person pees everywhere but my god, he looks like a little rabbit with his paws over his little face and it just makes me want to hug him until I gobble him up, but not in a violent child-eating way. In a oooooh I just can’t squish him hard enough way.

Nicolaus meanwhile was more bouyant than usual, and he chatted with us and instructed us on the ways of many things. The kid is writing a book of funny history… he dictates while I type, then he draws pictures and he wants me to print the whole thing out and make him famous somehow. Here are the entries he has come up with so far:

Nicolaus Copickleus
Discovered that the Sun goes around the Earth and THAT all goes around ANOTHER SUN.

Julius Meaner
Julius Meaner was an emperor in Rome. He was called Meaner because he was really mean and one time he killed Jesus. His reward from God was to get stabbed.

I have got to find the picture for that one because it is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Julius Caesar is standing there with blood gushing out everwhere and there are knives that his friends threw down and he’s saying something like “Oh I’m dying” – and there’s a beautiful angel up at the top saying “HER IS YUR REWRD.”

When Nicolaus tells this story he almost can’t talk he’s laughing so hard. “You know, your reward for killing Jesus?” Hahaha. Ha. Alright so technically Caesar predated Christ but the premise is still pretty funny. He cracks up telling it because haha! REWARD? Being killed? Get it? That’s not a very nice reward!

I love this kid. He is so damned weird.

Today was Kevin’s ten year anniversary of being married to me on purpose. When we explained this to Nicolaus and told him we were all going out to lunch to celebrate he asked why we were celebrating now, ten years later, instead of you know – like, at the time we actually got married. Because. We had our wedding that day and it was so stressful and exhausting that we weren’t up for going out to eat afterwards.

Oooh and! We have declared Saturdays our family art day. Tomorrow is the first one – we’re all going to work on projects and make a giant mess in my studio. Then we’ll clean it all up and go to the grocery store. I’m trying this new thing with cooking at home, and it’s almost becoming fun in a sick, satisfying way because hey look at me I’m acting like a regular person.

Okay shhhhh. I’m going to stop now.

Woah. So clearly there is a seething molten anger that rests just below the surface of polite society. I’ve so completely enjoyed reading all of the many ways that you are freaks.

Here are my own crazy pet peeves:
1. What a coincidence! This event/moment was led up to by all of the events/moments that led up to it!
In Castaway, Tom Hanks shows up at his girlfriend’s house and she hugs him and says “I knew you were alive all along… I just knew it.”
Well I’m sure the families of the other passengers just knew they had survived and were out there somewhere. But they were wrong.
And side note: If she really just knew it, why the hell did she marry somebody else? Awwwkward.

Or: “Wow, that is spooky that you called! I was just thinking about you.”
Of course you were thinking about me. I’m your daughter and I’m awesome. You think about me all the time.

2. My mother in law will say things like “What? I’m not going to stay away from your baby just because he has a horrible contagious violent illness. I’d rather me have it than him.”

?? What is that? That’s a kind of logical fallacy that Socrates didn’t even think to name. It’s like… just… Jesus.

3. Marketing people. All of it, every thing they do or say.

Wow, you guys are right – it does feel good to list those out.

I need to go to sleep, but there’s this mental list of things I want to jot down before bed.

Over Thanksgiving, Nicolaus had one night of a fever and a croupy cough followed by three days of the saddest case of laryngitis ever to affect a human. Stripped of his superpower, he refused to give up even as he tried to tell us all of the features of his new spaceship design and was reduced to squeaks and hoarse whispers. He whispered emphatically, waved his arms, invented a complete sign language which none of us could understand. Finally he gave up, curled up in front of the television, and whispered to himself.

Kevin said “My god. It’s like watching a puppy with no legs who won’t give up trying to play with a ball.”

Speaking of speaking, Graham is now in speech therapy. We are hoping to soon be able to understand much more of what he says, because the stuff we do catch is so great.

“Does a house mean it has a roof? Why does it have to?”

“Mama! Look! I wrote MAMA. I wrote your name! Look!” He was very excited, so I looked. And there on the page were three large wobbly letters: P I G
Now I know why my dad used to mutter this quiet reminder, “It’s not nice to say fuck you to your children…”

“Wanna see… BROWN?” – if you say yes — which you have no choice — he pulls up his shirt and flashes you with his glorious pink belly and chest. Because we are all shades of brown, afterall.

“I don’t love myself.” He insists that he doesn’t love or like himself. We finally figured out that it isn’t a self esteem issue, it’s that he thinks love means affection for another person. The idea of loving yourself makes as much sense as jumping out and yelling boo to scare yourself.

Same goes for his definition of friends. Friends are other children that he is familiar with. Adults he knows and loves dearly cannot be his friends, but kids he saw across a crowded diner? Friends 4 EVER.

He’s frustrated though when friends do not return his affection. After gymnastics class last week he sighed, “I told all my friends I’m not going to kill them today, but they didn’t answer me.”
There are times when it’s probably good that people can’t understand everything he says.

There was more to this post but I still need to randomly select a random winner and sleep a few hours before the day begins. Oh! It’ll be Kevin’s birthday.

Update: The winner is styleygeek. Who I chose randomly and then laughed at the comment because it included special begging. What a spooky coincidence, it was meant to be, etc.