Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus. ("Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.")

Seg’s new favorite word: Shit.

Fuck.

Also, everything that comes out of Seg’s mouth at the moment is a whine, right out of the gate. There’s no escalation because he’s being ignored or denied, it just automatically emerges as a whine, and more often than not, a LOUD crying sort of whine. I am at my wits’ end.

On the other hand, Primo doesn’t even need the flimsiest excuse anymore to poke, prod, pinch, punch, trip, smush, or hipcheck Seg. His new favorite thing to do is snatch Seg’s beloved baseball hat off his head and throw it somewhere semi-inaccessible, like behind the couch or down the laundry chute.

Here’s how stir-crazy *I* have become: I snapped at Terzo this morning, “I don’t WANT to read your book right now. Can’t you watch TV with your brothers?” (In my defense, I had already read both Duck is Dirty and The Wiggles Learn about Shapes about sixteen thousand times before breakfast.)

I pin the main impetus behind all this insanity to the rain – the seemingly never-ending, cold, dreary rain that has been pissing down for almost six straight days now. My backyard is a mudpit, everything feels clammy, and we haven’t seen the sun in way too long.

Today’s plan, because we are all off school due to MLK Day, is to get some of the yayas out: we are meeting some other moms and kids at the church to take advantage of the wide-open space of the parish hall, to play some soccer or football and run around like loonies. Then I promised my boys a special-treat lunch at McDonald’s, the one with the giant indoor Habitrail, er, playground, to finish off the rest of the yayas while I plug away at The Emperor’s Children which I am finding tough going because there is not single character I give a shit about in the least. (Holy run-on sentence, Batman!) Anyway, they’re all self-absorbed assholes, and the writing is self-consciously convoluted. I will give it a few dozen more pages and then it will be put aside for Intuition.