I really need to thank all of you for the outpouring of support over last week's emo post. You have taught me that I get far more attention being whiny than being funny. Now I understand Munchausen Syndrome sufferers a lot better. I have no interest in faking illness to get attention because that sounds like far too much work, but I may, like my five-year-old does, embrace my inner whiny baby more often.

It's Monday, it's beautiful out, and all the gremlins exited the pod and made their way to school. That, in itself, would make me do cartwheels if I wasn't 35 and rather bottom-heavy.

It's a quiet week for me - no big contracts, no bidding for contracts (although I really should be) - and I'm going to try and blog a lot. Why? Because I need to get back into writing. Writing will make me money (don't laugh) and that means we can pay our bills and sleep at night again. So even if it's dreadful, embarrassingly bad writing, it shall be written and published.

I apologize in advance.

It took me what seemed like eons to drag the kids out of bed today. None of us slept well. Gutsy wound up in our bed because he had a dream about being eaten by a giant orange tarantula (valid reason, if you ask me) and Spawnling woke up an hour afterwards due to his own bad dream of non-specific origin. Thus, Geekster and I split off in the middle of the night: he in Spawnling's far-too-little-for-two bed and I playing keeper of the alarm clock in our room with Gutsy.

My alarm went of at 6:25. I hit "snooze."

The alarm went off at 6:30. Not my alarm this time. It was coming from somewhere else in the house. I realized it was originating from Gutsy's room - the same Gutsy, of course, who was sound asleep in my bed.

I tried to put a pillow over my head. That only made my hair sweaty. I begrudgingly shuffled my way across the house and turned off his alarm. Then I went back to bed.

And this is when my alarm went off again.

I may or may not have used inappropriate language, then whipped around when I remembered that Spider Bait was sleeping on the pillow next to me - thankfully still sound asleep.

Anyway, that about ended any chance I had of getting a few extra Z's. It took a good half hour to extract the nine-year-old arachnid appetizer from my bed, but he did eventually answer the siren call of cereal and great conversation with his mom.

Well, okay, maybe just cereal. As far as he's concerned as a non-morning person, he needn't speak to me beyond asking for breakfast.

He opened up his laptop and started fiddling around for a few minutes. I asked him to get dressed. He went to close a program and it crashed. I said "Don't worry about that. You just go get dressed. I'll take care of it." A message had come up that the program had unexpectedly quit. It asked if I would like to send an error report or not. I clicked "DON'T SEND" and closed the laptop.

He glared at me. A Monday morning, you-displease-me, I-should-probably-start-drinking-coffee glare.

"Mom," he said, disapprovingly, "why didn't you send the error report?"

"Huh?" I replied intelligibly. "Oh, that? Because I didn't want to type in a description of the crash."

Gutsy sighed in the same way teenage me used to sigh at my mom. "If you don't send the error report then the developers will have no idea why their program is crashing. They won't find the bugs and they won't be able to fix them. You need to report these things so they can make their software better."

I looked at him in that I'm-not-sure-if-I-should-be-impressed-or-insulted way. "Sorry, Bill Gates. Go get dressed."

He kept his glare for a moment longer, as I had obviously offended him with my ignorance. He then turned around, sighed again, and walked into his room.

The problem Gutsy and I have is that he's smarter than I am. Oh, sure, he may not understand the world as I do, but that's only because I have twenty-six years on him. Give him time. All three of our boys are smart in their own ways, of course, but Gutsy's technological interests mean that I don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of even pretending I know my shit with him. The boy started grasping basic computer programming language over two years ago and has been fiddling with it in various forms ever since. He's nine. I should be able to run circles around his knowledge. I can't.

When he and his dad - the sexy computer nerd I married - chat about their shared passion for programming, things like "login scripts" and "compiling errors" and "forms" and "button events" start flying out of their talk holes. They do it right in front of me, which is really inconsiderate because usually I was thinking about something far more interesting before they started.

And the worst part? They often want to involve me in the conversation, like I understand and care about the topic. And I don't. I tried to grasp the concept once or twice, but it flew over my head and left me alone on the shores of indifference. If a computer program is available and I need it and it works, excellent. And if programming computer thingies makes my husband money to pay for my sexy car, excellent. And if my smarty-pants son can make more money than God someday (does God even have money? I hope He wasn't invested in the US mortgage market) and it buys me a cute little manor in the English countryside, majorly excellent. That's as deep as my caring for software development goes.

I should be proud that Gutsy's brain is on steroids. I am, sometimes. And sometimes I'm annoyed because I feel as though my solar panels are facing north around him. But most of the time I'm simply fascinated that he knows how to do this stuff, and make and edit movies, and build crazy inventions, and more or less just be good at all the things I suck at.

There are also times that I worry because his interests set him apart from some of his peers. How many grade 3 students can easily relate to a kid who finds compiling a C++ program the highlight of his weekend and then talks about it incessantly? When the class was asked to write compliments about each student, nearly all of Gutsy's were about how smart he is. I don't know if that's good or bad for him socially. Being happy and feeling comfortable in your own skin is far more important than being intelligent.

This is why I drill into him that everyone is smart in their own way, everyone has something they're really good at. I firmly believe this. I once knew a kid who was anything but an academic superstar, yet he could disassemble and reassemble bikes and engines like nobody's business. He later became a tradesman and entrepreneur and has done so well for himself. There is immense talent in every human being. This is how I hope Gutsy learns to connect with people; by seeing the innate intelligence within them and helping them to see it, too, if need be. In turn, he can learn about fixing bikes, playing sports, and many other things that will help him become a well-rounded guy. A happy, comfortable-in-his-own-skin kinda guy.

Like Albert Einstein once said:

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

For now, I'll let him talk over my head. I'll do that amazing mom trick and pretend I'm listening while I'm actually compiling the grocery list.

See, Gutsy? Mom can compile things, too.