electric boogaloo

We didn’t have the car today. I was glad to be free of the ability to run errands or go anywhere, and today was full of hilarity and drama involving everything you’d expect: stickers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spilled milk, our pet lovebird who has a cold, people falling off of chairs, nudity and general weirdness. We read most of Henry and Beezus, which I have started overanalyzing in the greater context of the development of suburbia and how much of child hood in our culture has been focused on acquiring material things since the 50s when these books were written. It’s always about Henry trying to buy a football or a fish or a cat or a bike or get something - and when he gets what he wanted, the very next chapter there’s something new he wants.

I’m an idiot of course; the books are awesome. So today we read a lot. We also spent a crazy amount of time playing with the dreamy sparkly play dough I bought for the boys last week.

This afternoon we pretended to trade eyes and ears until one of us started crying because it was all a little too real. Then we did school work off and on while listening to Tish Hinajosa, in between dealing with the routine business of food going into people and then later — although not as much later as you might expect — it coming back out.

But that’s not what I want to post about. I want to write about little little kids washing their hands, even though now I feel bad because people are going to google “kids hand washing” looking for guidelines or statistics or something and instead they’ll come here. Hi googlers: sorry.

It’s important for kids to wash their hands. But not only because of all the good germ-killing and all. Washing your hands is part of being a functioning adult, and it’s a fairly complicated skill. Most kids learn what they need to do a long time before they’re physically able to do it all:
1. Reach the sink somehow - locate step stool/adult/stilts
2. Turn on the water - every sink works a little differently, so you’ve got to assess it once you’re up there. Then you need to make sure you don’t use the hot water, because grownups are jerks who make things like this needlessly treacherous.
3. Locate soap. Each type of soap has its own challenges, assuming you can reach it. Bars are cumbersome and slippery, pumps require dexterity, and the public restroom soap dispensers are often empty or out of reach.
4. Rub hands together, getting all of the invisible germs which is impossible to know because they are invisible.
5. Rinse all the soap off, even though soap sticks and wants to stay between your fingers and stuff.
6. Play with the beautiful water until someone notices and makes you stop.
7. Turn the water off.
8. Locate and reach a towel. Is it the kind that’s hard to reach? Is it a soft towel? Put it back on the rack when you’re finished. Is it made of paper? Throw it away afterwards. Or just shake your hands dry, smile at yourself in the mirror, and be done.

It’s a lot of work, and around age three a kid starts to really be able to physically pull it off. They still have a dainty sort of toddler clumsiness, but they are taller now, better able to reach and twist and pull and grab and turn and scrub. And they are so very earnest about doing real things that it all comes together. I don’t know, I’m a sappy dork. I love watching little kids wash their hands. Everything about being a child is right there in washing hands. And everything about being a parent is all right there in seeing them do it.

Monday night:
Nicolaus is suddenly this huge creature with all these limbs. He’s in the middle of our bed, stretched out like a great dane. He snores; they all snore in fact, except for me because I am a dainty and delicate flower.

He couldn’t sleep. He says the folders in his brain all have springs in them and if he tries to slam them all shut they all go pop! So he can’t sleep. I can see where that might keep a person awake. That plus continually talking to yourself and playing games where your hands are these little creatures who have adventures, plus asking random stuff like, “Mama? Do you think that we are literally just floating on lava?” and, “You know something that’s been bothering me? Beverly Cleary acts like five year olds are not smart and are all obnoxious. Everyone in those books acts like five year olds are almost worse than nothing. It really upsets me.”

I think he says this because Ramona is hassling Henry and his father tells him “Come on Henry. Surely you are smarter than a five year old.”

Tuesday night:
I should be asleep. Really, this is ignorant behavior - or, as my grandmother says barbaric. We’d do something ridiculous like jump on the furniture or eat with our hands or talk during the evening news and she’d say “WE ARE NOT BARBARIANS.”

In all caps, just like that.

Although technically, none of us are part of the Roman empire and a lot of my family is Dutch and Irish so actually, we sort of are barbarians.

And hey, did you know that the word barbarians comes from the way foreigners sounded to the Romans? When they made fun of the way other people spoke they’d say “Barbarbarbarbar”

It’s my kid’s fault that I know that. And now that he doesn’t wear costumes and make weapons all day he isn’t interested in history anymore, so now he’d say he doesn’t know what you are talking about.

It’s 1:46 and it’s crazy to be awake. I put the boys to bed early tonight. They were both barbarically cranky from staying up too late and waking up too early, and they were being so rude that I just said enough and put them to bed. If I’d been smart I would have gone right to bed, but sometimes it’s so nice just to be alone with my own thoughts that wasting it on sleep seems outrageous. It’s much easier to steal a nap during the day than it is to steal 30 minutes to sit and think and surf the web.

I spent the time working on ideas for Nicolaus’ school work over the next 3 months or so.
There’s also something missing from our daily school work, and I’m not sure what it is exactly. But I’m working on figuring it out. We are definitely following our nose day by day here, but a little planning and goal-making seems like a good idea. Right now we talk about science all day and he’s very interested in reading and being read to, almost to the exclusion of everything else, but I don’t want to get too off track on everything else. Math in particular. Math isn’t his strong area so he avoids it, but will play little mathy games with me or will take over the roll of the teacher if I role-play the part of a person who needs help.

So I did some research and found a few sites that are full of cool ideas. And if you know of any or have any (inexpensive) suggestions on guiding a verbal-visual type of kid through math problems, lay it on me.

Wednesday night
This week, Graham has thrown fits because:
It wasn’t time for his gymnastics class
We were going to his gymnastics class instead of a certain restaurant that isn’t even his favorite
I didn’t let him go tell a man that he met a cockatoo that could talk
I stole his ears and gave them to Kevin
I didn’t know he wanted me to zip up his jacket until we were almost inside, and I am an unreasonable whore who wouldn’t stop in the freezing rain to zip up a jacket when seriously - the door was three steps away
There are two blocks that almost fit perfectly into the back of his toy metal truck, but they weren’t made for it so when you put them in, there is an unsightly gap.
It was bed time
It was time to go to the bathroom
It was story time
It was not story time
He can’t make a perfect star out of playdoh
Or a square
It wasn’t bath time
It was bath time
Of what Arby’s did to his sandwich.
I didn’t hear him say he wanted water.
I didn’t know he was being a Vogon.

Crap, I just remembered I forgot to put the clothes in the dryer and I’m too tired to get up and do that. Now tomorrow they’re going to smell all wrong.

Last night I made a promise to myself: Tomorrow, we clean.

When I woke up, I decided that the best way to get our horrifically messy apartment in shape would be to spend the day pretending to be my mother in law. It would be so easy! And I’d get Kevin and the kids to do the same thing and all of us will be a houseful of her, and we’ll stay focused and in character all day long.

So first I called my father in law and griped at him for whatever he happened to be doing because he was doing it wrong and should have checked with me first. Then we bought a bunch of noisy plastic toys, noted loudly that our kids have too many toys, made each other uncomfortable by discussing the human body’s overabundance of yeast, and discussed the many uses for apple cider vinegar and vitamins for about two hours. But! Right after that, we cleaned.

Kevin started in the kitchen. He rocks the kitchen. I sort of don’t get why we even have to have a stupid kitchen when there are nice people like seriously a five minute walk from our apartment who LOVE to cook food for us. It seems to make them genuinely happy when we show up, and I feel that in a way, whenever we choose to cook at home we are in fact robbing small business owners of not only much-needed monetary support, but the very joy that is the core of their existence. It’s pretty wrong to cook at home.

So while the boys pretended to be granny by (1) riding a noisy retro rocketship through the mess and (2) playing with Lovie the lovable lovebird, Kevin worked on the kitchen and I started at the front hallway and worked my way inward.

The problem is that there really is no line between kitchen and living room. He assumed I’d clean the living area, and I assumed — well, alright I’m not stupid and I knew that the part with the couch was probably safe to consider Not Kitchen, but by the time I got that far I was just sick of cleaning. How does she DO it? The more my mother in law cleans something, the more intense and determined she becomes to finish. I’ve seen her skip meals, set aside her own physical ailments, shove aside her beloved grandchildren, and push old people in front of buses in order to get a cleaning job 100% complete. But I can’t stay focused. I have a timer in my head; no matter how great cleaning is going and no matter how satisfying it is to see the floor again, every 15 minutes the timer goes off and my brain says Ding! Fuck this.

Then I grab the computer and click everything in my bookmarks toolbar for ten minutes, and find myself disappointed that nothing on the internet changed while I was cleaning.

The entire day went on like this, until 6:00 when the boys started melting down from the stress of riding their toy rocket around so much and being able to walk in their bedroom without tripping over spikey plastic dinosaurs. I started feeling frazzled and frustrated that they were making it so difficult to clean, what with their incessant need to be fed and nurtured. I was just about to stuff them both in the dryer and turn it on low heat, tumble dry when Kevin’s mental timer went off.

Ding! Let’s go to the dollar theater.

Kevin has the best ideas. It must be fun to be so smart all the time. So that’s what we did, we went to see Wall-E, and I found it totally and utterly charming, mostly because I sat next to Graham who asks the best questions during a film. What is that animal? How is Wall-e doing that? How is he doing THAT? What is that? How does Eva talk? Why is her head OFF? And so on. Oh and the part where Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher to scoot around in space, he whispered in awe: “When I grow up tomorrow and I am in space, I am going to use one of those. But I’ll use a toy one. Not a real one like that.”

(I’m translating from Dutch/Graham speak. What he actually said was winIgrowuhtomhhh anImihspeh I ah goeuhuhwahaohs. IwahyuhaTOY ONE. Nahareewahliyyat.)

So we came home, made a late dinner, read stories and put everyone to bed. The house isn’t clean, but it’s cleaner. It’s now to the point where most people would look around and go, Man. Tomorrow we should really clean this place up.

We were running late, but I didn’t feel stressed. Even as we hit our third inexplicable clot of traffic and the clock shoved closer to the start of Graham’s class, I felt the kind of calm of someone who knows that really the day is going well, the house at home is fairly clean, and one missed clay class a childhood does not make.

It’s creepy to realize how much of reality is just the exact mix of chemicals that happen to be squishing together in your brain that day. Because a week ago my female hormones would have rammed into my whatever else is in there and it all would have been powerful enough to light up an actual light on my car’s dashboard which would have flashed: CHECK TIME - YOU SUCK.

And I would’ve driven the same speed but the drive would have felt faster, more hurried, and more awful. Sometimes it feels like I live in one of those frenzied traffic reports they yell over the sound of a news radio chopper. OVER ON THE NORTH SIDE WE HAVE AN EAST BOUND PARENT WHO IS STILL CLEANING UP AFTER IN AN EARLIER INCIDENT INVOLVING AN OVERTURNED CUP OF MILK IN THE BACKSEAT OF HER VEHICLE. CONGESTION IN BOTH CHILDREN, EXPECT DELAYS AS THEY DECIDE WHETHER TO WEAR FALL SHOES OR SANDALS OR MAYBE BALLET SLIPPERS THAT DON’T EVEN FIT.

Those weeks are long. But not this week. This week I’m having an easier time zooming out, backing up from the intense focus on all of my stupid minute-by-minute tragedies. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t suck - I do. But this week, even as I run late and mess things up and end up at Arby’s, I’m noticing the fiery trees that line the suburban streets. Their leaves look like paper. And even through my filthy windshield, the sky is a chalky blue, and in the backseat my boys are warning me about activating the warp engines.

I’m not proud of how much I enjoy their Star Trek chatter. It truly warms my heart. “There,” Kevin says, “Are you happy? You finally have friends.”
He’s right! Man. It makes me wish I’d had kids sooner. Like - if I’d gotten pregnant at 14, then Nicolaus could have watched Star Trek with me every day during my freshman year of college. It would’ve been SO FUN.

Anyway, it’s a decent week so far. I’m making an effort not to slip into a funk, and to remember the many ways that I do not suck. I need a motivational poster to constantly remind myself: You might be a lame mom, but you’re the best mom they have. Besides, it’s not like they know any better.

Right this second I’m sitting at a neighborhood coffee shop which offers free babysitting in their fancy enclosed play area while you sit and work. It’s a really neat place - for $7 you can use their wireless internet and legally ignore your children for two hours. The boys like it, but I know it’s lame. We should have gone to the park today, or to a museum, or to the library even though the library has no more books on account of my children checked them all out last week.

So I’m sitting and instead of working on fixing my web site or catching up on etsy feedback, I’m blogging and sort of spying on my children. I’m also apparently using the word blog as a verb with a straight face. Disturbing.

There are times when I’m tempted to compare them. Like when I have to drag Nicolaus into the hair cut place, where he watches darkly and scrutinizes every teeny snip because he already told the girl that he is growing his hair out, so this had better not be a serious cut. And then it’s done! So we start to leave, and then I have to physically drag a screaming Graham out while he begs for a haircut.

Or when I order pizza.
Graham: White sauce, every topping except olives.
Nicolaus: Red sauce, extra olives only

Or when the day begins. Every day since he was born Nicolaus has run into our room and begged us to get up! Start the day! Let’s go! Let’s eat! OMG! GET UP GET UP GET UP. I wonder what that does to a kid, to have to work so hard to get his basic needs met like that. You know, like psychologically.

Graham comes to our bed at sunrise too. He shuffles in quietly, climbs up next to me and whispers, “I needa blankit.”

“Do you want to get up and have breakfast?”

“No.” He says, and he yawns and falls back asleep.

Their fundamental vibes are so different. Nicolaus is a PC, he makes things needlessly difficult and crashes a lot. He wears muted colors. He has a great work ethic, and only cost us $47 if you count the $20 I paid to get a private room at the hospital when he was born. Graham is a Mac: he is silly and makes everything simple and cute, but he cost like $8000.

So I’m spying on them. Graham is playing by himself, running with their little shopping cart and goofing around with all of the pretend food. From what I can tell Nicolaus has befriended another boy about his age and is pressuring that kid into joining him on a serious mission. They’re both having $3.50 worth of fun I think. I know I am.

I can’t say much more without altering the course of history, but when did one little blog post ever hurt anything?

Update: Whoops. Please stand by while I correct the inadvertent web site goofiness that resulted from my carelessness. And I also need to say that the writers for Heroes and numerous other shows may bite my ass. Because they always show time travel-related bloopers as relatively easy to fix and it turns out that that’s NOT HOW IT WORKS.