Tonight bedtime was full of them jumping up and down on springy furniture while shouting and laughing about baby lynxes, with me putting and re-putting their bedtime stories in and out of jeapordy until finally — enough, that’s it, no stories, good night, brush your teeth and go to bed. They started to protest but there was no defensible reason for acting like caffeinated babboons other than it was just FUN. They gave in to their mean-mother, no-story fate.

A few minutes laer I went into their dark room, somehow treading over legos without saying any cusses out loud. I step-leaned back and forth between their two loft beds, giving hugs and quick nice words about being proud of them and loving them and promising to maybe even feed them tomorrow if they played their cards right.

Questions that were fired at me in the middle of goodnight hugs:

* What causes bubbles to form? And since bubbles can be formed out of different things like soap, gum, water… so technically are all those things the same kind of bubble?

* Where did the English word “bubble” come from?

* Is there a word like onomatopoeia but for how things LOOK instead of how things sound? Because bubbles don’t really make a sound, but they look… bubble-ish. (argument followed about how they do make a sound, but that’s when they pop not when they are being bubbles, no no they make a sound when they’re being formed, kind of a bubbleglurubble sound…)

* Hey, are all humans actually related? They must be! Can we find out some way if one of our friends has one of our same great great great great grandparents or something? Does everybody have somebody the same in their family somewhere?

* A whole bunch of chemistry questions that are going to have me reviewing Khan academy videos late into the night.

Chemistry was my weakest subject in school… how can electrons be real things?? Finding the answers to this kid’s questions has already forced me to comprehend a lot of stuff that I worked so hard to avoid learning in high school and college. Oh look at that! The Periodic Table is not just a name! There are periods in it! And look at this, these things add up to atomic numbers and oh oh haha I get it. ATOMic. ELECTRONics. NUCLEAR energy. Really, somebody very clever must have figured out all of this stuff.

He also wants to learn more geometry than I think I know how to explain to a third grader. In high school I used to get partial credit when I would write “OT: Obvious Theorem” because all of the names and things wouldn’t stick in my brain. Why do we need a special rule for every kind of scenario where two equal things are equal? And why are you all making me sit here in this stupid class when I want to go outside and read? And why does the boy I like act like he likes me, but then he says he doesn’t? The Annoying Postulate and the Whatever Theorem and the I Can’t Believe I Got a B in this Class Corrolary.

But Nicolaus likes geometry and chemistry very much, almost as much as he likes history and greek myths. I think he was sent here by my teachers to punish me for being such a rotten student. And that’s okay because one day I am going to will his children to LOVE handwriting. They’ll beg for lengthy handwriting lessons and “Please daddy!” his kids will say, “Please write out our bedtime story in your neatest cursive!”

And he will talk about it in his video blog after the kids go to bed and I will watch it and I will laugh and laugh.

Why does it happen? Why are things with kids sometimes suddenly difficult? Marriage is like that — mostly wonderful and easy and energizing and then for no reason, everyone in that marriage is cranky and difficult at the same time and nearly every conversation tangles up into a tight little knot and you can’t pull it apart. Traffic works the same way. So does dog training, meal preparation, creative work, family relationships, and… well, and the weather. It’s all that same thing, things mostly flow along fine until just the right amount of this lumpy problem here, someone tapping the brakes just for a second, a slight hormonal shift, running late, a little pressure, background changes, something lines up just exactly right to throw everything into turbulence and it sucks. But then, you wait a little while and oh! Everything smooths out again and goes on.

Graham has been a huge challenge for us over the last six months. I know, we KNOW that every kid goes through phases of development. They have to do it. Their brains make them do it. Children can’t NOT do these things, and in fact they shouldn’t not do these things unless you want them to grow up to be unhappy because you never let them progress naturally through whatever any one particular phase was doing to shape their brains.

So you have to roll with it to some extent. But the reality is that some of these perfectly natural, very common phases are annoying as pee. As parents it’s our job to help him find appropriate outlets for his energy, and if that isn’t possible then it’s our job to buy a bunch of whiskey and then take up heavy drinking and then run out of the whiskey and go buy a bunch more bottles of whiskey and drink them all.

Because I don’t care what Neil DeGrasse says about how developmentally healthy a rules-free parenting style might be, there are times when seriously oh my crap if you don’t stop making that sound right this absolute instant, I am going to EAT you.

And every kid is different, right? so it’s not even something you can ever fully brace for. Different developmental changes will be more difficult for some kids, might last longer for some, and you never know until you’re already in the middle of it trying to figure out what happened to your life. Maybe your toddler was picky about food textures for just twenty minutes one morning and you barely noticed it… or maybe yours ate nothing other than that one brand of macaroni for two years. Some kids are the biters at preschool, some try their hand at lying, some whine even when there’s no reward for doing it, some panic over minor things, some splash in every puddle and wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care. But hey, some of the biter kids never happen to be in preschool, so it doesn’t come up and no one notices. Some of the kids who screech have parents who don’t mind noise at all, while yours might screek-growl-howl in the exact particular octave that happens makes you suicidal.

It’s all stirred in there like that. For most parents, maybe a phase of screaming the word “SQUEGEE!” in a gutteral falsetto wouldn’t even register as interesting. But for me, well, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard has a new and improved formula that makes it talk. If Gilbert Godfried himself were sitting at my dinner table I’d tell him to knock it off with the voice already and just talk like himself. That’s my kids’ lot in life I am afraid. They were born with parents who don’t like a lot of pointless racket and/or obnoxious fake voices.

I did know about these phases before I had kids. In college I babysat a very cool couple of kids until the older child, a girl around age nine, somehow got it into her head that quoting Shakespeare was super charming. And it is! Only she only knew one line and she refused to learn more, so she said “ALAS POOR YORIC I KNEW HIM WELL!” over and over in a million different dramatic ways until I finally told her okay, that’s enough of that forever. A few weeks of non-stop alas poor yorick and she went from being my favorite babysitting gig to oh man, sorry, I can’t, I have plans.

And when my brother was about eight he went through a thing of quizzing us about the prices of every piece of retail space we passed. “How much would that building cost?”

Which sounds really NOT annoying at all! It sounds charming, in fact. And it was charming until we couldn’t have any other conversations in the car because we were passing so many buildings and had to speculate on the probable price range of each one. And even then it would have been amusing as a single real estate-focused car ride but oh this conversational fixation lasted almost a YEAR and let me tell you something about me: I do not know how much that building would cost. And I do not like to spend energy talking about things that we have no way of settling by just talking. This was before we could look things up, so you know. Just imagine it.

Still. STILL.

It’s even more upsetting when your own child is the one with the annoying thing he does because now you have to deal with the twin hassle of being annoyed AND feeling guilty for being annoyed because you are supposed to love your child no matter what and never ever wonder whether you could put him out with the recycling.

So Graham. He switches into crazy mode and won’t back off, won’t get out of people’s faces, won’t stop making abrasive sounds or saying random words which are no longer random now that he has a list of favorites. He likes: Mop. Squeegee. Spatula. Vacuum Cleaner. Woozel. Chicken bottom. Wombat. Wayne.

And he’s not wrong! Those words are all 100% hilarious. That’s what makes it so difficult; most of the time when we want him to stop something, he is not trying to be mean or annoying. He is trying to be funny. And he IS funny. But then you have to stop being funny when people want you to stop.

This is the number one thing that gets him in trouble. STOP means STOP.

Squeegee!

We’ve talked to him about how when you’re a grown up and someone asks you to stop something and you keep doing it, that’s called harrassment and it’s illegal.

Mop!

And you can go to JAIL.

Chicken bottom!

You just really have no idea how hard we have tried to get him to stop acting like a lunatic over the last six months. He’ll be himself, mellow Graham, easy and funny and sweet and engaging. Until something happens to make the switch flip. It can be a few minutes of boredom. It can be that he saw his brother’s eyes flutter awake in the morning or a friend coming over or until a waitress smiles at him. An audience! I will impress them with what a lunatic annoying random word generator I can be!

We give him time and places in his day where he can make all the kooky racket he wants. But there are times and places where being very loud and falsetto-hilarious isn’t okay. In the car, at mealtime, at someone’s house, or right in people’s faces when they have asked you to stop.

Time outs, asking, telling, demanding, yelling, taking things away, offering bribes, natural consequences, on and on and on and — no effect. Do you know about the Singing Bush? That’s my son. My son is the singing bush. Scolding, frowning, everything just pings right off of him. He’ll feign hurt feelings but you can tell that a lot of times, he’s only pouting on principle. He recovers instantly and forgets the grievance and goes back to being very cheerfully obnoxious.

A few weeks ago, in a moment of absolute frustration, I grabbed a huge white cardboard box that was waiting for me to cut it up and recycle it. Grabbed a marker and drew a big sad face. Above the face I wrote THE NAUGHTY BOX.

The boys were fascinated with it. Ooooh a box! A box for being naughty! That sounded great to them. I explained how it would work, but they were mainly worried about the sad face on the box. Why is the box sad? Will he ever get to smile?

Four minutes later, Graham was back to shouting Wayne!! at the dog right in her face. I asked him to stop, and reminded him about the naughty box. He paused for a moment before going back to his rousing game of Doggie Wayne-Face.

I went into his room and came out with his favorite pajamas. And to his complete, miserable horror I dropped the pajamas into the sad-looking box.

“What? When do I get them back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What am I going to wear tonight?”

I shrugged, “I’m not sure. Different pajamas or a shirt or… I don’t know.”

We’ve taken things away before, but something about the giant sad-faced box makes it profound and awful. No, wait. Not awful. Something about the giant sad-faced box makes taking things away more magically authoritative and wonderful.

Is it ideal? Should we have to defer discipline to a stand-in cardboard parent with only one technique? No, no, nope. But holy heck, if you had a singing bush in your living room you wouldn’t care about ideal.

Nothing. Totally naked right now. Not a metaphor for anything deep or interesting; this here is literal, actual nudity right here on the internet. I know the Internet is full of naked ladies, so this isn’t really worthy of note to anyone else but for me it’s a rare treat to be nude and online at the same time. I am also wet.

I used to take baths all the time. In grad school I did all of my reading in the bath away from all distractions. And once Kevin and i were married “Is it okay if I go take a bath?” was our polite way of getting time alone. Very much love each other, very much like to be social but we are both people who need to recharge sometimes or we become frazzled and horrible.

A normal bath lasted up to two hours, but there have been bathing marathons that rocked half the day. It’s probably unhealthy for your skin or something, but we make up for our few vices by being mostly safe and boring by modern human standards. I also clean my ears out with q-tips. I can’t be stopped! It’s the fault of the cotton industry and Johnson & Johnson for tempting me with such a perfectly ear canal-shaped wand. I wouldn’t have even thought of putting it in my ear if they hadn’t put a big thing on the package saying WARNING do not put this in your ear, no matter how satisfying it may feel to do so.

So judge me. I wear my seatbelt, have never tried a single illicit drug, have never smoked, rarely drink. Instead I clean my ears. And when I was younger, I took a lot of very long hot baths.

But something has gone way out of balance. I work all the time, stopping only to parent, to let the dog out, to eat and to pee. Otherwise I am working. It’s not a complaint; I like working. It’s exciting! It’s non-stop problem solving, puzzle-wrestling creative analytical back and forth. It’s hard and exhausting and I love doing it.

The problem is that lately I feel guilty any time I’m not working. I can’t goof off and enjoy an episode of Misfits without working at the same time. I can’t relax and eat a meal without having a browser open so I can do some work-related research or reply to emails. If I take the kids to the park, I bring paper and pen so I can work on pricing while I’m there… Which would be okay if I didn’t feel guilty otherwise, as thought I was wasting time. Time spent watching my kids play at the park. Is that wasted time?

Of course growing a small business takes a lot of work and a lot of time, and I think that’s perfectly okay. I don’t think parents should feel bad for needing to work. But the other side of that, the side that’s not okay is the voice in me that berates me when I’m not working. That’s what keeps me from indulging in the fun of writing blog posts, the fun of doodling little sketches that have nothing to do with our products, the fun of having a glass of moscato and watching a show with my dog and/or my husband and simply enjoying the experience itself.

The other problem is that it’s not good for mental health to be so focused work all the time. The stress is familiar — in school I used to load up on hard courses and work until I was nothing else but a buzzing brain walking around, forgetting my keys everywhere and forgetting to eat and forgetting what I was saying right in the middle and then being surprised and annoyed when the person I was talking to was actually interested in hearing the whole thing so now they are making me put in effort to remember this thing that wasn’t all that great anyway.

And that’s why we are up in the mountains this week, in a beautiful rented cabin where everything is so quiet I could cry from relief. Like a jerk I brought my laptop so i could design the labels for the new magnet sets (yay magnet sets!) but my clever stressed-out brain forgot to bring the power supply. When we get home I am going to force myself to start practicing willful breaks in every part of the day. In the meantime here I am, in the bath. The boys are playing, Kevin is cooking bacon, and I am doing nothing. It feels wrong! But the part that makes it feel wrong… is wrong.
So Hello, blog. I miss you very much.

Another guest post is live over at Little Ladies Who Lunch.

Why do I always set out to post a recipe and some photos and end up writing a long self-reflective post about the meaning of food? Food is powerful, food is a big part of a family dynamic, a huge part of the budget, and maybe even a defining part of childhood. Scary. Food is scary! Food can kill you! Food brings people together, takes time and energy to create, forms the center of good days and bad days. Even on days when you are sick and you scrap everything else in the realm of parenting, you still have to feed everyone.

Yikes, I leave for a couple of weeks and come back to a comments section full of jumbled up spam. Sorry about that. And if my spam catcher is eating real comments again, please let me know. I have it set to KILL for now.

This week I’m doing a some guest posting over at the very lovely http://littleladieswholunch.com/post/15457448012/crunchy-guest-post Little Ladies Who Lunch blog.

How I got mixed up in a healthy home made food operation would be a horrifying mystery to the me from the 1990s, but here we are.

Meanwhile, we are working like dogs to get all of our new products put together for this year. We want to do more jewelry items, more cool baby stuff, more more more. We have so many ideas that may or may not actually be good products. A couple of weeks ago I was in OMG Let’s Just Have Everything Made in MFing China meltdown crisis mode. It was awful, born out of total frustration from trying to get what we want produced here.

It’s not a matter of going overseas to make a little more money on a product — it’s a matter of not being able to find USA manufacturers at all. It’s a matter of asking customers to pay $25 for a small plush rattle that’s on the shelf next to dozens of $8 rattles. A lot of times it means a choice between going overseas or just scrapping this or that product altogether. Which is fine except that it’s so cuuuuute and I want to produce all of the adorable nerdy things. But “I wannnaaaa” is not really worth compromising over, is it? No, not yet. There has to be a solution and this is what I spend my late nights doing instead of writing and updating my blog; I am working on all of the designs and searching for creative ways to use local resources to produce everything for a cost that American consumers will pay.

It’s exhausting being this neurotic, let me tell you. But! I think we’re figuring it out. Little by little by little… slowly slowly slowly the little train climbed the mountain…