Next Monday the family leaves on an abbreviated vacation to Sequoia National Park. This an extremely beautiful place, and I’m looking forward to going back there, because I haven’t been in, Lord, 14 years? But travel with three small kids can be extremely daunting, and I’m anticipating the trip with a mixture of pleasure and trepidation.

I did the smart thing and made reservations at the Wuksachi Lodge, even springing for the deluxe room. We were going to go with the rustic cabins, which are much more economical, but which can best be defined as mostly like a tent, but with walls and electricity. I worried, with the kids, though. We had an adventure in camping nearly three years ago which still gives me nightmares. So I’m playing it smart.

But Sequoia is, well, a national park located in the middle of scenic nowhere. It’s nearly a five-hour drive, and the kids just aren’t used to that stuff. They complained plenty about the length of the trip the last time we went to San Diego. In general, here are my fears:

• The kids will start complaining on the way up there, which will drive Ben crazy while he’s trying to drive because they complain in three-part harmony, and boy are they good at it. And where is there to stop on the way? Ha. Mostly nowhere, or places which are even worse than nowhere.
• Boolie will have to pee every five miles, and little girls just aren’t good at peeing by the side of the road.
• The kids will get to Sequoia and say, in essence, Right. Big trees. Cave. We’re bored. Can we go home and play Wii now?
• We will all be eaten by a bear, and I’m a huge fan of not being eaten by a bear.
• Although at least if we are eaten by a bear, the kids won’t be able to complain they’re bored.
• The food will be both abysmal and expensive, and there are extremely limited dining options in the park.
• I will forget to pack something extremely key, for which a replacement won’t be available in the park.
• The van will malfunction somewhere along the way.

That about covers it. It’ll probably be a good trip, but at this point, imaging how many things could go wrong, I’m pretty much shittin’ kittens. If was just Ben and me, we’d get by. But when you start traveling with kids, it’s a whole new ball game.

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.

Wait. Do I still have a blog here? Well, my God, of course I do. Except when I don’t. But Woodland Elementary School has gone into its usual end-of-school-year posture of standing on my neck and standing on it hard.

California has a legally mandated free school guarantee. Theoretically, my children are meant to attend school for free; due to the fact that Ben is disabled and I’m presently unemployed, they even get a free lunch. (And they say there is no such thing!) But even public schools always have their hand out. At the end of the year, for some reason, they hit us up especially hard.

Today was the Woodland Elementary Jog-A-Thon, where kids run laps for money with nothing to show for it but the free T-shirt. I pledged $25 per child — a pretty typical amount. Just this past Saturday, the Kaiser-Woodland carnival was held, whereby all the kids at both schools were exhorted to eat and drink and play, proceeds to benefit both schools. Last week I shelled out $10 each for two Woodland T-shirts for the boys. Every Friday they have Spirit Day, at which time (surprise!) everyone is expected to wear their Woodland shirts.

Next week is Open House. That will involve the Book Fair, which benefits both Scholastic and the schools, and a burgers ‘n’ chips dinner supplied for free by a local merchant and paid for generously by the parents, proceeds to the schools. Not to mention the end-of-year teacher gifts and the snacks for Jog-A-Thon and so on and on and on.

I’m not really complaining. (Or am I? I believe I’ve just kvetched at length.) We are fortunate to have a world-class school district with extraordinary teachers and maximum 20-child classes. Compare that to LAUSD which has teachers who border on illiteracy and class sizes of 30 or so. Newport-Mesa USD relies largely on local property taxes, which are hefty, meaning that we haven’t been touched by the waves of teacher layoffs that have touched other districts in the county. The fallout is a bit daunting — I had to attend a brief meeting and provide three forms of proof of residency and property ownership last month just to keep our boys in NMUSD schools — but the benefits are considerable.

Still, I’ll be glad when a month has gone by and they stop squeezing us for this year. The last day of school is June 19. For my boys and for my checkbook, it can’t come early enough.

Over the weekend we again went to San Diego for a mini-vacation — to please Sam, we chose a less Mexican part of town. We stayed at the Embassy Suites San Diego Bay, near to Seaport Village, sort of near to the Gaslamp Quarter. It was the best compromise I could find between a potential flophouse and the fucking Ivy.

I have to admit, I was gratified at how kid-friendly the place turned out to be. The desk clerk wisely put us on the 12th floor, at the very top of the hotel, and all three of them adored zooming up and down the atrium wall in the glass elevators. There is an indoor pool, which impressed them, and the hot tub was relaxingly full of parents and kids rather than yuppies sipping cognac. The evening manager’s reception (happy hour) and the morning full breakfast, both of which are complimentary, were enough of a free-for-all that no one paid much attention to my little darlings.

The biggest challenge of the weekend was helping Boolie to navigate. The hotel and Horton Plaza were full of sights that boggled her little mind, and she walked around with her head in a swivet the entire time. What she forgot was to face forward while walking, with the result that she walked smack into a number of people and things. The worst of these was a solid palm tree trunk in Horton Plaza; I narrowly steered her away from a nasty-looking metal signpost just before she made painful contact.

The main purpose of the weekend, really, was to meet up with an old undergrad friend of mine I hadn’t seen in upward of 30 years. And not just any undergrad friend, either; he was one of my classmates in the Freshman Honors Program at the University of Delaware, an experiment in what would happen if you took a bunch of propellerheads out of high school a year early, plopped them together in a rarefied university setting away from home, and fed them a diet of all-honors courses and colloquia. (The answer to this was Lots of partying, allnighters and sex, but it’s also true that many lifelong interests and friendships were formed in the process.)

(Editor’s knote: For those of you who may be wondering, the classmate in question was one Philip Stanley. Take a bow, darlin’.)

Anyway, it was a fun reunion. I don’t go to school reunions, and when you’re seeing a classmate you haven’t seen in 30 years, you’re understandably nervous, hoping they don’t think you’re too decrepit or too much of a fuck-up or that your kids are fucking obnoxious. Philip was — is — a dear friend, and therefore not prone to the sort of snark that infests most reunion situations. Either way, he seemed to like my kids and hit it off with Ben, and there was none of that long-pause awkwardness that can happen when two reuniting old friends discover they don’t really have much of anything to say. True to FHP tradition, we stayed up way too late drinking white wine, and duly felt like walking dogshit the next morning.

But the true highlight of the weekend — sorry, Embassy Suites and sorry, Philip — was the she-crab soup. I have already had on about this on Facebook, but like anyone with a new love, I’m over the moon and must speak and speak of it. There are very few foods you want to eat in a dark room with your eyes closed; much of the time, I really don’t like food all that much. It is messy and time-consuming and often not worth the trouble. This stuff, though, rocked my world. I had it at the Harbor House restaurant at Seaport Village, and I’m eternally grateful to my Southern friends for tipping me off that such a thing exists, and that it is probably the food they serve in Heaven.

I’ve spent a few hours in the ensuing days Googling and Googling until my fingers are sore to find a place in Orange County which serves the stuff. The best I’ve been able to do is a fish market on the Redondo Beach pier which sells not the soup, but actual she-crabs, according to rumor. You probably don’t want to imagine the spectacle of me struggling with any crab more complex than a king crab leg; substantial swearing and cut fingers are involved in the process, with very little actual meat as the reward. Still, it may come to that. Honest to God, if you haven’t had the stuff, go out and correct this mistake immediately. You’ll thank me.

So today it’s back to reality, the boys back to school and me to my loads of laundry and neglected housework. Our next getaway isn’t until Sequoia National Park right after summer vacation starts, and now that we’re getting the family travel thing down to a science (and have time on our hands due to our unemployed and/or disabled states), it’s hard to stay home. Plus I’m such a lazy bitch that the prospect of having people make the beds and pick up the towels is really, really appealing. Either way, it was a good weekend, and I imagine we’ll be back. If only for the she-crab soup.

Sometime after we arrived solidly in middle age, Ben and I separately became aware that we each had become invisible to the opposite sex. You know, when you’re younger, guys or girls passing on the street meet your eyes, they smile. As you get older, you don’t look to strangers like someone they’d like to meet; you look like their dentist. I’m 48 and have had four kids. Ben is 53, somewhat overweight, and prematurely grey. We look like someone’s parents. He’s invisible to girls and I’m invisible to guys. It’s been that way for so long we can’t remember any other way.

Except that recently I picked up some black capri pants. They’re really sort of an exercise tight, I suppose, which is sort of funny if you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen the inside of the gym. But they’re comfortable, and rather form-fitting. Ben opened his eyes wide the first time he saw me in them. Those pants are very flattering, he said. And I caught him staring at my ass for the first time in years. Strange.

Then today I wore those same pants to the grocery store and noticed that suddenly I was visible to men. Every guy I encountered who wasn’t actually in the company of a woman smiled and said Hi to me. Not just senior citizens, either. Guys in their 20s, even. Seven or eight of them. At first I didn’t even realize it was me they were talking to, but unless they had imaginary friends, it was me. I hardly knew how to react anymore. After a few minutes I got the hang of a faint return smile and a quiet Hi back. It was insanely freaky.

Because, of course, I didn’t suddenly turn human. I didn’t suddenly turn female. I just put on some pants that made my ass look good. Those guys weren’t saying hi to me; they were saying hi to my ass. They didn’t even care, apparently, about the clearly fortysomething woman accompanying that ass. And I don’t know which is more pathetic: that fact, or how secretly pleased I was at the attention.

Meanwhile, of course, I’m buying seven more pairs of these pants and will not take them off until someone pries them off my cold, dead ass.

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.

My good friend Mark of Going Like Sixty, who is mostly absent from Facebook although a member, warned me about this. Facebook and Twitter are going to result in the death of blogging. It’s just way too convenient to post a 20-second tweet or Facebook update rather than actually sit down and think out a chunk of something well-organized and meaningful. If you look at my blogroll, which I have not updated since approximately the dawn of time, you may notice that a lot of my reads have left off blogging altogether in the past year or two.

Part of the reason for this is probably that a lot of people I know write for a living at least to some extent. Oh, I only can claim to know one novelist on a personal level, and that largely because we nursed babies simultaneously. But a lot of my friends write for at least some portion of their gainful employment, and there is the endless legal writing that consumes us legal types, even though we’re not writers as such. Many of us are eager to take a break from writing, not to escape into it, for God’s sake.

Either way, people don’t much want to take the time for words, or an attention span, anymore. We’re all about Twitter and Susan Boyle and 15 minutes of fame, little dribs and drabs of this and that. No time, no commitment. Even as I write this, I’m losing interest in writing it (although this may be in large part for the reason that all three of my young kids are simultaneously running around screaming like loons). Even when they’re not distracting me, there are the glugs of arriving e-mails and the pops of arriving chat messages. And that’s for someone like me — a total misanthropic bitch! I can’t imagine the distraction level for people of normal socialization.

I don’t want to make the point I’m trying to make for fear of lapsing into a reverie about the good old days of snail mail and network television and morning and evening newspapers. But I think it’s pretty obvious. The Internet is a two-edged sword, and people have the attention span of gnats. A bunch of years ago I was on the cutting edge of blogging. Now I’m on the cutting edge of being too lazy to blog anymore. And I’m not at all sure this is a good thing.

See y’all on Facebook.

It’s wonderful to have Ben home from the hospital, and finally I can sleep again — he was admitted on a Monday and discharged on a Friday, and in the intervening days I got all of 2.5 hours sleep. (I’m not exaggerating. I counted.) What I didn’t count on was how completely disabled he would be when he came back to me. I’m now running the house completely on my own while caring for the kids and caring for Ben. This comes as something of a shock.

There was, you know, a reason why I changed my major from Nursing to English at the end of my first undergrad year. At the time it seemed a rather random decision, but I know now that it was the Universe whispering in my ear: Because verily, thou shalt spit in the patients’ faces and tell doctors to go fuck themselves. I’m just not the Florence Nightingale type. Not that I’m not nurturing to my family, but it’s a more rough-and-tumble sort of nurture: Hey kid, get over here and get some noogies, then let’s watch Robot Chicken. This, however, is not an appropriate way of dealing with a man who is in either extraordinary pain or a Vicodin haze, and furthermore cannot walk much, lift anything, take out the garbage, or be of any help whatsoever.

It’s a daunting task. And did I mention that in addition to doing everything both of us used to do, and taking care of the kids, I’ve had to become a sort of de facto dietitian and pharmacist? I devised a daily medication schedule, posted it on the pantry door, and oversee his meds four times every day (because he is on meds and might not remember). I also maintain a day-timer calendar wherein I record his weight, his temperature (which must be taken twice daily to watch for infection), and spend considerable time daily in devising and cooking heart-healthy meals. And cleaning up afterward. And keeping a lid on the kids. And making sure Ben takes his daily walks and uses his little breathing-practice thingy and that his incision is healing properly.

This is not going to last forever, of course. In the context of our lifetime, it’s a blip, a drop in the bucket. But damn it, I’m not at all certain I’m up to the task. Oh, I can discharge my duties, but the trick is to perform them with a sunny and patient attitude. Sunshine and patience are not generally counted among my skills. People have said many things about me, but Oh, she’s got the patience of a saint is not one of them, nor is She’s so cheerful, a little ray of sunshine. No, my reviews have run more along the lines of Damn, she’s a bitch or Smile, will you? You don’t smile enough! The work I can handle, but achieving the proper attitude is testing me to my limits.

Don’t tell my husband, of course. The last things he needs, atop all his other woes, are worries about his wife. (Come to think of it, he’s on enough Vicodin that I’m not sure he knows he has a wife.) And I hate to admit it, because I fucking hate this expression, but this experience will probably build character. Besides, it might be post-surgical me someday. And I am here to tell Ben that payback’s a bitch.

So last week Ben and I had lunch with his mother. I’ve always had a bit of a thorny relationship with her, although there’s no real animosity between us — apart, of course, from the usual animosity harbored by a mother toward the girl who her only son finally married in midlife.

It’s just that MIL and I are both very opinionated and stubborn, and said opinions are usually completely at odds, especially regarding childrearing. This stands to reason, since she’s a very 1950s buttoned-down, conservative sort of lady who believes in building character and following all the rules, which are many. Whereas I’m a sort of hippie chick who tries to go with the flow, live and let live, you know. Plus she doesn’t mind telling people how to raise their children — in fact, she insists upon it. I just do my thing and blow her off. Also, I was raised Catholic and she (for reasons never explained) is staunchly anti-Catholic.

Despite that, or quite possibly because of it, she started Pope-bashing the minute we were all in the car. You know, that to-do about advising Africans against using condoms. And I don’t mean that she disagreed with the Pope; I mean that she excoriated him. There was much bandying about of some really pejorative terms. I’m anything but a good Catholic, but I’m Catholic enough to feel very uncomfortable hearing this whether I agree with the Pope or not. (I guess she was trying to make me forswear my possibly Papist ways and denounce the Church.)

She kept trying to engage me in the conversation, but I just said Well . . . a few times and got very interested in staring out the window. I really don’t want to start sparring with her. Not worth it, and besides, poor Ben.

But she was just getting started. I have no idea on earth how the topic arose, but MIL brought up circumcision and why it’s absolutely necessary to do it, and what dire results there will be if it’s not done. Both my sons are intact, and she very well knows that. Bear in mind that the last time I birthed a boy was in 2003, so you could say it’s a done deal.

I politely explained that there’s no medical justification for circumcision according to our research. She said the presence of a foreskin leads to hygiene problems. I told her it’s easy to keep clean. (I forcibly restrained myself from asking if she thinks it’s reasonable to cut off a part of the body just because we don’t feel like washing it.) She harrumphed. Stalemate.

But she wasn’t done; she then turned a hawkish eye on the earrings, six in total, dangling from my ears. (I don’t think she’d ever seen me with more than one pair before.) Well, that certainly is a lot of earrings. What is that, three piercings? When on earth did you do that?

Nineteen ninety-three, I said.

Well. I certainly hope you haven’t gone and pierced Julia’s ears! she went on.

Are you following this, people? Jesus hemorrhaging Christ, the woman chastises us for not mutilating our sons and in the next breath forbids us to mutilate our daughter. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

Special Bonus Joke:

A man is having digestive problems and goes to see his doctor. The doctor examines him and tells him he’s got a tapeworm. Here’s what you do, says the doctor. Every night for the next three nights, I want you to shove a hard-boiled egg up your ass. And then shove a Tootsie Roll up your ass right after. And come back and see me the day after the third night.

The guy of course thinks this is extremely strange. How will that help? he asks. You’ll see, says the doc.

So the guy does it. Every night for three nights, he shoves a hard-boiled egg up his ass, followed by a Tootsie Roll. The next day he goes and sees the doctor. The doctor immediately shoves a hard-boiled egg up the guy’s ass and grabs a hammer. The guy wonders WTF.

After a few seconds, the tapeworm sticks his head out the guy’s ass and says Hey! Where’s my fucking Tootsie Roll? whereupon the doctor hits the worm on the head with the hammer.

Cured.

As many of you know, my husband had open-heart surgery today, and let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve paced around a room for 7 hours with the knowledge that your beloved has had his heart and breathing stopped and been placed on a heart-lung machine while a surgeon, whom you devoutly hope is a good one who didn’t overindulge in Scotch over the weekend, plays dicey games with the organ that keeps your husband living. I think he did a good job; my husband is, according to the CVICU, now off the respirator and sleeping with the help of some good drugs. Let’s hear it for good drugs!

The bad news is that he’s gone for the week, and in the 9 years we’ve been married, we’ve never been separated for more than overnight. I’ll see him every day, of course, but I miss him like crazy; he wasn’t awake when they let me briefly inside the CVICU after his surgery, and I haven’t heard his voice since 7:30 this morning when, under the influence of the first in a series of many good drugs, I listened to him hold forth to the anesthesiologist about the demise of President William McKinley, who was assassinated — more specifically, he died of gangrene in his gunshot wounds after an assassination attempt. (Leave it to my Ben to give a historical and medical discourse when schnockered. The anesthesiologist assured me he’d never remember a word of what he said.)

I can’t wait to see him tomorrow, when he’s conscious and hopefully lacking many of the scary tubes running in and out of him. I can’t wait to tell him how Matt’s male Monsters vs. Aliens Happy Meal toy tried to hit on Julia’s female one over dinner at McDonald’s. That’s the sort of detail that makes a dad like Ben smile. And tonight I’m very thankful that my kids have a dad.