It’s official — Sam has been promoted to first grade. After being judged in danger of retention last grading period — I believe because of lackadaisical attitude, mostly — he passed with flying colors.

My big boy. I’m so proud of him! Daddy is busy taking him to lunch to celebrate, AND Daddy has a totally promising job interview next week. WOOHOO.

Sam’s kindergarten class had its graduation recital this morning, with about 100 kids taking part. Sam was chosen to deliver the closing remarks, which he did with aplomb, with his father and big sister Erika and me looking on.

I can’t believe how much he has matured in the nine months since he started kindergarten. Then, he couldn’t even write his name; now, he’s reading and writing sentences independently. He’s gained a lot of self-confidence and a lot of boyish good looks. I’m insanely proud of him. He’ll be six years old on July 5, and is still in that wonderful stage of childhood where his father and brother and sisters and I are still the center of his universe. I savor every minute I get to spend in his presence.

These are my new metallic hot pink (fuchsia?) Birkenstock sandals. I love them SO much.

Matt, who is four years old, was using the toilet this afternoon in the master suite, and called in to the bedroom for Ben or me to come help him with the paperwork, as it were. Ben came in and left the door ajar; I listened from the bedroom.

Look, Daddy! I made four turds, he said. See? One. Two. Three. Four.

I wonder if I should call the Sesame Street people? Surely they never thought of counting turds.

There are four animals I had never encountered until I moved to this part of Orange County some 16 years ago. These animals are endemic to Newport-Mesa, and are all designed to either scare the fuck out of you or annoy the shit out of you. They are:

Fucking Midnight Birds. I don’t know why any bird in his right mind would stay up and party all night, but there are some locals which do exactly that. The chirping and twittering starts around midnight and doesn’t really get calmed down until it’s almost time to wake up and chirp some more. I don’t know much about birdcalls but by their voices, I judge them to be some sort of wren or sparrow or finch. Either way, they are out of their fucking minds, and the chirping, on nights I can’t sleep, drives me crazy. Right now it’s 1:15 a.m. and I am trying to wait them out.

Big Scary Orange Spiders. Oh my God, how I hate them. They don’t really get going until a bit later in the summer — perhaps July — but once they show up, they really make up for lost time. They make huge, huge intricate webs, which they always cunningly stretch across a sidewalk so that you will walk into them. And then you wind up shrieking OH MY GOD HELP SPIDER SPIDER because when you break through the web, the fucking spider himself slips inside your blouse. It is rumored that these spiders also have a poisonous bite. I don’t know if that’s true, but I don’t intend to find out and I am terrified of them either way. I think they eat people! They must build those webs across the walkways in hopes of someday capturing and eating a human person.

Overhang Flies. These are probably more properly called gnats, but every summer the little bastards semi-swarm beneath every patio cover in the vicinity, buzzing around your head while you’re trying to grill a steak, or committing suicide in a wineglass. We burn citronella tiki torches to try to get rid of them, but they do not go away and quite possibly are ALSO plotting to kill us.

Gigantic Black Bumblebees. Now, you wouldn’t think a bumblebee could seem threatening unless there are a whole swarm, but these bees, who travel alone, are quite scary enough when taken one by one. The things are like a walnut with wings (hmm, I just described Harry Potter’s Golden Snitch) and they make a dreadful buzzing noise as they swoop down out of nowhere in their aggressive, intimidating manner. Whereupon the boys and I all shout ACK GIANT KILLER BEE RUN RUN RUN until it flies off somewhere to go scare someone else.

So I’ve been sick for about a week — the diagnosis is gastroenteritis, although I’m not at all certain that’s not just a medical code word for a tummy ache of unknown origin.

But they wanted to do some diagnostic tests. So they filled out the form and sent me to the lab, where they drew my blood and then presented me with three sets of plastic vials for stool samples.

People, have you ever? Just reading the instructions was enough to give me the shivers, and I am here to tell you that I would have to be at Death’s door before I’d agree to fool around with my own shit. Ben and I have been dealing with baby shit and dog shit nonstop for nearly six years now, and I DO NOT WANT ADDITIONAL POOP-RELATED ACTIVITIES IN MY LIFE. Especially when those activities are meant to be hands-on (”If the stool is solid, try to get samples from each end and from the center.”)

I mean, my God. The stuff isn’t Play-Doh, y’all — I’m not going to go digging around in it! I wonder if there is someone I can HIRE to do this? For now, I am keeping my poop where it belongs (versus kicking around in the outside world). Because this is just TOO. MUCH.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much this guy squicks me out. Being the mother of three kids aged six and under, I spend my entire life watching Nickelodeon, and I am a well-known SpongeBob fanatic. Except that this guy is almost a deal-breaker, you know? He doesn’t show up in every episode, thank God, but when he does, he is (a) stupid, (b) boring, (c) personally skeevy and (d) possessed of an unseemly amount of body hair. And I know, because once they showed the fucker in the shower. Only from the waist up, praise Jesus, but I had nightmares for days.

THIS is a girl who DID NOT go to the Ducks rally in Anaheim.

Have you ever wondered if the exciting, unpredictable bits of your life are all over? I don’t mean the mundane surprises of daily existence such as tax audits, road accidents and indelible upholstery stains; I’m talking about adventure.

For a girl so adventurous, I seem in retrospect to have done my best, for much of my life, to foreclose adventure right out of the picture. I bore my first child at 23, and just as she was about to come of age and fly the nest, I remarried at 39 and started right in having more children — one, two, three. I  never did get to wander about America, trying different places and seeing which tasted like home. Oh, I made it from one coast to the other — but apart from the inevitable layover at O’Hare, I never saw any of what was in between. At this stage of life, it’s reasonable to assume that I never will go all Kerouac and cut loose on the road.

Furthermore, it’s becoming clear to me that my husband has a perverse love of his own — it’s a love for Southern California, and I don’t think he will ever leave here willingly. Therefore it falls to me to choose; and there being only one right choice for my children, here I stay, bound to the West Coast.

Memory and imagination. They are what’s left over when your wings have been clipped for the final time.