I somtimes have problems with late May and early June, because I spend the whole time waiting for things. Waiting for the NHL finals to be over, because every year that is a super-huge deal to me. Waiting for the school year to be over, because although the last day of school isn’t until June 19, this is the fuck-you time of year, commemorated by Open House — which is tomorrow night, and which is the annual Woodland Elementary aren’t you glad this crap is almost done? celebration. We are looking forward to lots of late nights goofing around, watching too much TV and playing Wii. Oh wait, we’re doing that shit already. We’re all about late-spring fever.

The year goes by so quickly — I don’t mean the calendar year but the school year, which starts at the first breath of Labor Day and ends approximately now (or five minutes ago, if you ask us). The summer goes by in an eyeblink. We have a trip to Sequoia planned for the Monday after school ends, followed by a trip to La Quinta [Palm Springs area] for July 6-9 to celebrate Sam’s 8th birthday. No sooner do we get back from La Quinta than the Orange County Fair starts, lasting a month, on the heels of which are Boolie’s 4th birthday, Erika’s 25th, and then — gasp — the first day of school. All this is punctuated with trips to beach and pool. Summer is always a blur.

So I guess we’re lucky to have a pause right now. The boys’ school rather wisely suspends and/or lightens homework for the kids in June, and waiting out the end of the NHL season always goes by too fast. Meanwhile, we’ll welcome home our new baby, a juvenile pink-toed tarantula, who is due home tomorrow morning. You gotta love spider babies: they don’t require expensive car seats and don’t scream in your ear all night. Which is appropriate for the time of year when we all stop to take a breath before the next round of family life begins.

Of course I didn’t mean I would stop blogging. You think I’m ever going to shut up? Think again, flyboy. I have Serious Issues to consider! Like what to do with the black eye Boolie gave me last weekend. (I leaned down to hug her just as she suddenly snapped her head up and bounced it off my browbone.)

This is a serious, serious black eye. Immediately there was a bruise visible on the browbone, and by the next morning it had burst forth in blue and purple from my eyebrow to an inch below my eye. That thing is — was, as it’s finally starting to fade — fucking spectacular. Watching a black eye evolve is like watching a sunset. The shifting patterns, the changing hues. From blue and purple to yellow and green and then to a sort of maroon as it prepares to fade. Lovely.

But here’s the problem. I figure that anyone who doesn’t know us will take one look at me and assume either that I pulled an Amy Winehouse and staggered into something (fist? door? could be anything with that broad), or that Ben popped me one. Which reminds me of a joke. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? — Nothing. You already told her twice. (And yes, yes, I know domestic violence is not funny, and hereby issue this disclaimer blah blah blah.)

Anyway. So if we are for example having lunch somewhere, should I explain my eye to the waitress when she comes to our table? It seems I shouldn’t, but you have to figure she’ll be wondering about it all through lunch. Possibly the entire wait staff will be wondering: Hmm, she doesn’t look like a loadie. Nor like Nicole Brown Simpson, for that matter. Perhaps she’s part raccoon?

Rather than explain, I’ve taken to keeping my Ray-Bans on indoors when anywhere besides home. This sometimes makes it hard to navigate, and also, it must make me look like some tourist trying to be all California cool. So should I explain that? No, I’m not an asshole, I just have a black eye. But I don’t want you to see it. That’s why the sunglasses. Or something. Ordinarily I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, but a black eye is one of those things that just screams Think something!

And the eye makeup problem is a real bitch, too. I have to wear eye makeup — trust me, I do. So do I put makeup on both eyes? The bruised one seems to have quite enough colorful pizzazz already, but I don’t want to be asymmetrical. Perhaps I should have blacked the left eye as well, to match? Well, too late.

I told you I had serious issues on my mind.

Especially for Going Like Sixty and all you other Boolie fans out there. Ain’t she grand?

She passed away late Tuesday night, or early Wednesday morning if you wish to get technical. I have so many things I want to say about her, from picking corn in the field behind our Pennsylvania house when I was a child, to her sweetness and patience with my rowdy sons and headstrong Boolie toward the end of her life.

I’m a terrible Catholic. I think we’ve established that. But howsoever you believe, believe that she is now in some fantastic place. Because if there is ever a woman who deserved an ideal afterlife, it’s my mom. I’m a pain in the ass, and she put up with me with very little complaint. Think: How many people are that generous? Not so many. Please hug your loved ones tightly tonight, and be happy they are here with you, even if they are pains in your asses. Because someday they won’t be there, and your ass may be missing that particular pain. Mom, when all was said and done, was no pain at all. She was just love. That’s what Boolie thinks. Good night.

The kids today at the local pumpkin patch.

Just a few weeks ago, I was having on about how Boolie, who turned 3 in August, is not potty trained and still uses a pacifier. I wasn’t going to push those issues at the time, because her brothers had just gone back to school and she was going through a rough time. Still, you get to thinking Christ, maybe she WILL start kindergarten in diapers.

For the past 7 years, Ben and I have had at least one kid in diapers, often two. Hell, Sam didn’t toilet train until a couple of months before Boolie was born, so we were in danger for a while of having three in diapers. We’re more than ready to have diapers gone from our lives forever: the expense, the stinkiness, the disposal issues. We’ve been saying for a couple of years now that when Boolie finally toilet trains, we’re going to buy a bottle of good champagne and have a proper celebration.

Well, I think we’ve cracked her code. She didn’t want to go to the toilet because she was afraid of falling in. We solved this issue with a toilet seat insert (with Disney princesses on it!) purchased at Target yesterday afternoon, and she’s been happily using the toilet since then. She even brings a book with her so she can read while sitting on the pot, like everyone else in the family. We’re not out of the woods yet, but her diaper days are numbered. (I’m secretly hoping she’ll train within the next few days, because we have about 10 Pampers left and I hate to buy another box if she’s not going to use them.) We even let her pick out a packet of panties, with the promise that she can start wearing them once she stays dry regularly.

So there is light at the end of the tunnel. And then what? Yesterday she went all day without her deedee. She wanted it when she was falling asleep, but she spent the entire day with no pacifier plugged into her mouth. The kid has, it seems, decided to grow up overnight. Isn’t that always the way? Erika, my oldest, got her first period the day she was asked on her first date. (I almost had a coronary.)

This first week of school is adjustment time for everyone. I’m adjusting to getting my lazy Polish ass out of bed before 7 a.m. and getting the three kids dressed, backpacked and out the door. Sam is adjusting to having his sometimes embarrassing, sometimes welcome little kindergarten brother at his school. Matt is adjusting, of course, to kindergarten. And Boolie is adjusting to suddenly being the little one left behind at day care, the odd girl out.

She’s the oldest kid at day care now that Sam and Matt have flown the coop for the school year. There are a couple of babies about 18 months old, but apart from that, there is only Boolie. And she has developed, just this week, a complex about being considered a baby. (We will not address the fact that, just turned three, she is still in diapers and still has a pacifier in her mouth. Because she is presently under duress, is why, and now is not the time.)

Last night she lay awake until 10 p.m. worrying about people thinking she’s a baby. Everyone says my feet are little, she said, but my feet are long. I’m big. Stuff like that. She awoke twice in the dead of night with nightmares, at one point trying to crawl off the bed because she was convinced she’d been put in time out. She’s her usual cheerful, affectionate self by day, but her bedtime musings and her night fears are telling me she’s got some worries to work out.

Complicating matters is the fact that this Friday night the day care lady is throwing a slumber party for “the big kids” and Boolie is not invited. This is mostly intended as a little reunion for the summer day care crowd after the first week of school, not to mention a night off for the parents. But for Bool, it’s only going to highlight her status as not a big kid. Ben and I are devising something special to do with her alone while the boys are off at the sleepover.

She’ll be okay. Of course she will. But Matt is not the only one adjusting this week. We’re all sorting things out. I can’t wait until it’s October and we’re firmly settled in our routine.

Boolie has learned, probably because it is summer and she hangs out with her brothers all day, to stomp on bugs. (I suppose I could get all Jainist on your ass and insist this is morally wrong. Believe me, though: In a houseful of three males and one little tomboy, you can run such a concept up the flagpole, but I guarantee you no one will salute.)

Anyway, here is Boolie’s bug-stomping routine: She picks up her foot and poises it in the air and says Peekaboo! Here comes my shoe! And then the bug is toast. She also makes her “mad face” at them, which basically consists of scrunching her little face up and narrowing her eyes. She assures me the bugs are making a mad face at her.

I can’t correct her, because she’s just so delicious. Tomorrow is her actual third birthday, and I will try to get a photo of her flashing her three fingers and her mad face. If she will cooperate, that is. Because Boolie is what Boolie is, and you can’t stop her.

(Here is the part where I forcibly restrain myself from caving in to Mommy Blog Syndrome and writing a gushing post about one of my children on her birthday.)

Boolie will turn three years old next week, and she really is a sort of miracle, because there wasn’t meant to be a Boolie. She shocked the crap out of us when we found out she was on her way.

Ben and I had planned to have children; we agreed that if we’d been younger, we’d want to have three, but given our age we would settle for two. It took us nearly a year to get a successful pregnancy off the ground — I had three miscarriages before Sam — but once we got going, we really got going. Matt was born 18 months after Sam arrived, and we figured we were done having babies.

But the “third child” was always lurking in the background. I was proud to have given Ben two sons, but a girl would have been nice. Still. I was 44 years old and it was no time to think about more babies.

Around autumn of 2004, my online friend Lisa (who refuses to blog, so I can’t link to her, dammit) asked Are you sure you’re done having babies? Because I dreamed of coming to visit your family, and you had a baby girl on your hip. I laughed and told her of course I was done having babies. But Boolie had other plans.

A pregnancy test came back positive on December 12, 2004, and Ben and I were shittin’ kittens. We spent the first 48 hours saying “Oh shit. OH SHIT!” but once we settled in to the idea, we sort of liked it. And of course we knew Boolie would be a girl. She was born just a couple of months before my 45th birthday, bright and healthy.

She’s amazing. Ben calls her the cherry on top, the finishing touch our family needed. There is lots of noise and chaos and mess associated with having three little kids, but we wouldn’t trade her for anything. Not even a little peace and quiet.

Happy birthday, Bool. I guess I gushed a little anyway, but you’re pretty awesome.

You’d think that with the deedee in her mouth, Dollybug wouldn’t have room to scream fit to bring the house down. But she does, she does. Every bedtime.

Julia has always had a number of specific elements she requires to go to sleep. These are (1) her mom and dad flanking her in bed, (2) her deedee in her mouth, (3) her “water bottle” (actually a sippy cup) cradled in her arms, or at least within reach; and (4) whatever is her favored toy of the moment. When she was younger, if she had these things she would happily settle in and, after talking your ear off for a while about nothing in particular, fall asleep.

But now she’s going through the Howl Before Sleeping phase. I remember it well, because Sam did the same thing. Every night at bedtime, and even though she’s got all her necessities in place, she decides that she absolutely needs something we are not going to allow her to have. This could be anything: her coloring book in bed with her, another Bob the Builder cartoon on Sprout On Demand, a DVD she wants to watch, you name it. Invariably, though, we have to say no.

And then she commences to wail. She screams as though we were boiling her in oil, while we patiently tell her Boolie, you’ve very tired, honey. Lie on your pillow and go to sleep. After she screams for a few minutes, she passes out cold and sleeps through the night. This happens Every. Single. Night.

I don’t know what causes kids to go through the scream yourself to sleep phase. I only know that we will be very glad when it’s over. And it being summer, and everyone having their windows open, I’m sure the neighbors will be glad too.