As Matt learns to write, Boolie is learning her letters. She is doing a creditable job of singing the ABC song and getting the letters in the proper order. But with attitude, because she always finishes with:

Now I know my ABCs; Next time I won’t sing with you.

No matter how many times we’ve sung it to her the proper way. In fact, usually we are admonished to be quiet and don’t sing! at all. You show ‘em, Bool.

Matt knows how to write his name, but he steadfastly refuses to write his ABCs. Still, somehow he has learned to write. The other day we found the following note, unsigned but obviously authored by Matt, as Sam’s handwriting is of course much better than that. And he knows enough to write this:

I don’t know who it is, but clearly someone is a doo doo. (Sam believes it’s directed at him.) Just what you’d expect from a Crumpacker kid.

My older son, Sam, is just getting over a particularly nasty case of strep throat and has been out of school for the past four days, ergo my absence from the screen. The hell of it was trying to figure out whether he just had a virus with a sore throat, or whether he had strep and needed medical treatment.

Y’see, I am categorically opposed to dragging kids to the doctor for each and every sniffle. I have three little ones, and if I did that, I’d spend my life running one or the other of them to the doctor. Especially do I resent making a sick kid sit in the doctor’s waiting room for an hour, probably picking up every other bug that’s going around in the process, only to be told “It’s a virus. He’ll get over it” and then charged $20.

So I try to figure things out for myself, with the help of Dr. Sears, whose website is my childhood illness Bible. On the subject of sore throat, he mentioned that the signs of strep include fever over 101, red spots in the throat, swollen glands, and a lack of pain during swallowing.

Well, Dr. Sears is awesome and all, but Sam’s symptoms were fairly different from those. So, as a public service, I offer you a list of the features of his strep:

• His fever reached 101 only once, instead hovering around 99-100 degrees and sometimes coming down completely.
• He had no red spots in his throat. His tonsils were mightily swollen, though.
• He had extreme pain on swallowing.
• His glands were not swollen or tender.
• Oddly, he was salivating heavily and spitting repeatedly. He said his throat was too sore to swallow his spit.
• He had constant nausea and occasional vomiting.
• He had absolutely no appetite whatsoever. None, and usually that boy is a real snack hound. He also refused to drink anything, including diet 7-Up, which is his favorite.
• He was nearly catatonic in the mornings, sleeping until noon or so, then perked up considerably in the afternoons, thereby fooling me into believing he was getting better.

When I finally took him to the doctor on the third day of his illness, the doctor did a rapid throat culture which was positive for strep. He started the amoxicillin at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he bounced out of bed wanting to go to school, which request was denied on the fear that he would infect everyone else, whose parents would then hate us forever. Today, 48 hours after appearing to be at death’s door, it’s like he was never sick at all.

So, you know, it’s a dicey thing. Illnesses don’t always follow the common course, and it’s often tough to determine how sick a kid really is. Word to the wise. Have a good weekend, and watch out for spitting kids with sore throats.

I have a secret society of girlfriends. Many of them are on my blogroll and none of us want you visiting our private message board, because then it wouldn’t be, well, private. But y’all know who you are, Sistahs, and everyone else can just bugger off. Anyway I shared with my Sistahs today a photo too good not to share with the public. Because: Behold, Ben and me on our wedding day!

Secret footnote: Inside I’m holding our first son, Nigel, who did not survive. Sweetie, we’ll never forget you.

Secret additional footnote: I don’t know why Ben’s hair looks like that. He most certainly does NOT wear a bad toupe that doesn’t match his hair.

Double secret additional footnote: The apparent blot on the landscape at my waistline is actually a Quantas Airlines pin left to me by my beloved Daddy, who died four months before the wedding. Good night, Daddy.

Going Like Sixty tagged me with a meme wherein one is meant to post a memoir in six words, accompanied with an appropriate illustration. This would boggle anyone’s mind, yet it’s self-revealing in its way. So here is my memoir:

Erika; Ben; Sam; Matt; Boolie; death.

And in turn, I’m tagging:

Kristy of Wicker Chickens

Rebecca of Somewhere Over The Pond

Tara of Hello, Hey, It’s Me

Holly of Nothing But Bonfires

We returned from our vacation yesterday afternoon, and it was, as people always say, both great and too short. We had a gorgeous condo overlooking a duck pond and featuring a gorgeous soundtrack of rushing artificial waterfall (that is, when we could hear a freakin’ thing what with the kids and all).

We returned to find Newport Beach a toasty 95 degrees, and today, at not quite noon, it is 91. Despite its reputation of a Mediterranean climate, when So Cal bakes, it bakes clear to the beaches. I have 150,000 things to do around the house, including finishing unpacking, tons and tons of laundry, all the sweeping and straightening up we failed to do before we left, and overseeing Sam’s full roster of vacation homework, which we didn’t touch the whole time we were gone. GOD.

Anyway, Ben and the kids are clamoring for my attention, and it is incumbent upon me to take a shower (I slept till 10 a.m., goddammit, because THIS IS THE LAST DAY I CAN) and herd the family off to somewhere with air conditioning, at least until the heat of the day passes. I had hundreds of e-mails when I returned, I’m behind on absolutely everyone’s blog, and my husband WILL NOT SHUT UP. Therefore I am here to say “Hello, I must be going.” See you after I dig out from under.

In my bedroom, apparently, is a wormhole or some portal into another dimension. Over the past week, all of my son Sam’s dirty underwear and all of Boolie’s deedees (pacifiers) have disappeared from my bedroom into, apparently, nowhere. Now, Boolie has been known to stash things in odd places — but the complete disappearance of Sam’s underwear is a deep, deep mystery.

Every day he changes his underwear in my bedroom, which for convenience’s sake is the central location for all changing and showering activities at our house. Every day he tosses them in the hamper. And every last pair has disappeared. Simultaneously, Boolie’s deedees, which cost $4.39 per pair and of which we have purchased a thousand in the past two years (you do the math), have all vanished but for two. Probably someday we will find a stash of 500 when Boolie has long outgrown them, but meanwhile you absolutely do not want to confront this girl in the dead of night when she wants a deedee and you can’t produce one.

We are about to leave on our annual vacation tomorrow morning. We’ll be returning to Lawrence Welk Resort in northern San Diego County, which admittedly is in the middle of geographic nowhere. But the kids like it. We can’t go with no deedees, and Sam cannot freeball it the entire week. Therefore, this morning it was incumbent upon me to go to Target and purchase:

• Six deedees (which won’t be enough, but which cost me $13).
• Twelve pairs of underwear for Sam.
• A giant poolside coverup thingy for me to wear.

We’ve got a ton of packing to do, and I’m hoping we won’t forget anything crucial like the boys’ swim trunks, sunscreen, or one of the kids. Meanwhile, I’ll be off the screen for the duration. (If you’re planning to come rob our house while we’re gone, I would discourage this because my daughter and her giant husband, as well as the Basenjis, will be housesitting. Plus our shit isn’t worth stealing. I guarantee you can get a better TV from any one of our neighbors.)

Have a nice week, and keep a close eye on your underwear.

Anytime a parent gets wistful about her kids, that is God’s cue to make something happen so they’re not wistful anymore. Last night we not only had all three kids in our bed, we had them up and down and in and out all evening and all night long, and it was the worst night of sleep I’ve had in a long time. I’ll spare you all the details, but suffice to say it involved a toddler who hadn’t napped and a six-year-old who’d lost a baby tooth AND had a case of the barfs, both of whom parked their asses in our bed by 6:30 p.m. and didn’t move.

Until the dead of night, that is. And there is NO reason to stay up for hours like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

I’m catatonic. Here is the backlash for not having your babies wake you up in the night: they just do it when they get older, instead.

Sam is nearly seven years old, which means that Ben and I have been sleeping with one or more babies and kids in our bed for almost seven years now. I started keeping my babies in bed with me out of sheer laziness: the ability to nurse them in the night just by rolling over and popping a boob in their mouths, without fully waking anyone up, was just awesome. My babies never cried in the night. They never had to, because I was there.

Later, as they got older, the family bonding was just too fun to give up. Falling asleep with them and waking up with them was wonderful, all of us piling into bed and cuddling and talking and laughing. Bonus: It helped prevent further babies. (And for those of you who wonder how on earth Matt and Julia were made, I say this: There are other rooms in the house.)

A while after Julia was born, I moved the boys out into a shared bedroom on the grounds that it was just too damned crowded for the five of us, even with a Cal King bed. It took a little doing, but Sam and Matt settled into their new sleeping arrangements, and now are always going off to their room together, usually to make a mess. We still had our baby girl with us, though.

But for the last two nights, Boolie has headed off to have a “sleepover” in Sam and Matt’s room, leaving Ben and me with an empty nest. Eventually, we may have to put a little bed in their room for her; I can’t see the three of them crowding into a full-sized bed forever, although we Crumpackers have become real pros at sleeping in close quarters.

She usually comes back in around 4 a.m., but my little bird is getting ready to fly the nest. I am immensely proud of her, and secretly brokenhearted. How did all this happen so fast? You’d think Ben and I would be relieved to have our space back, but it’s like every other time the kids aren’t with us: we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Slowly we’ll remember how to be something other than parents together, but it’s been a long time.