"Then why did I have the bowl Bart? Why did I have the bowl?" - Milhouse, in "The Simpsons"

My children are driving me up a wall. Remind me again why I am jonesing for a fourth?

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Terzo has learned to say Mama, although I am not sure he knows what it means: he wanders the house chanting it: “Mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama mama…”

He is becoming increasingly verbal and the two older hooligans delight in making him say potty words:
“Terzo, say Poop!”
“Poop!”
“Say Pee!”
“Pee!”
“Say Fart!”
“Fart!”
“Say Mama’s going to kill herself if you don’t cut her a break really soon!”

And he is into EVERYTHING. Because of the way our kitchen cabinets are built, I use rubber bands and/or wooden spoons to hold the doors shut. Ditto the cabinet in the bathroom and the video cabinet. He has managed to unwrap ponytail holders from every one of these places, regardless of how tightly I wrap them. And while I understand that not everyone grasps the importance of alphabetizing your videos, it would be nice to not have the boys crunch over a layer of them when they walk through the living room.

He likes to go into the bathroom and flush the toilet and turn on the faucets and pull all the tissues out of their boxes. He also unrolls the toilet paper and wanders away with anyone’s toothbrush he can reach, leaving them in weird, unsanitary places like under the kitchen radiator or in the dog bowl.

Speaking of, he likes to splash around in the dog’s water bowl like it’s his own personal wading pool, and if he can open the door to get down onto the landing (I have caught him several times trying to wedge his solid little body through the cat door), he methodically places each and every bit of kibble in the cats’ bowl into their water bowl.

He especially enjoys navigating the living room without touching the floor: from the piano bench to the armchair, along the back to the arm of the couch, along the couch to the ottoman to the coffee table from whence he flings himself triumphantly onto the second armchair.

He routinely tries to ride Punto as if the dog was a horse, and failing that, he steers him by his tail. The one cat knows enough to hide from him but the other, less bright one has also suffered to be straddled and ridden.

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Meanwhile, Segundo has turned into a very...volatile...four-year-old.
EVERYTHING is a TRAGEDY! Of the highest order!
Resulting in floods, FLOODS, I tell you, of tears!
Because life is terrible and IT’S! NOT! FAIR! Accompanied by stomping feet and jumping up and down for good measure, in case I didn’t grasp that IT’S! NOT! FAIR! WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s not fair that he has to eat cereal for breakfast! Wait, no, it’s waffles that’s not fair! And it’s not fair! That his clean underwear is folded in his drawer! And it’s certainly not fair! That we require him to eat dinner before he has a treat! NOT! FAIR!

I expect him to brush his teeth?
NOT FAIR!
I expect him to put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket?
NOT FAIR!
I expect him to not push down his younger brother and take away his toy?
NOT FAIR!
I expect him to stop yelling and go to sleep sometime before midnight?
NOT FAIR!

No one loves him, he’s going to hate me FOREVER, and by the way? It’s NOT FAIR!

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By comparison, dealing with my motormouth Primo is a cakewalk. It only took threatening to not let him go to a t-ball game, and making him apologize to his teacher, to get him to stop chattering so much in class and listen.

I do wish he came with a volume knob, as I do not want to listen to anyone (well, except maybe Colin Firth) recite the Pirates’ batting statistics, game schedules, shoe sizes, and a gamut of other fascinating facts, before breakfast, or for that matter, EVER.

I freely admit it: I DON'T CARE what the starting defensive line of the Ottawa Senators is, what high school Chris Duffy attended, or Ben Roethlisberger is left- or right-handed.

I even don’t care who Primo would vote for, were he old enough to vote.
And yet? He continues to regale me ceaselessly with all this information, and more.

Just so you know:
He’d have voted for Rick Swartz, and not Dan Onorato, for county controller.
He’d have written in Bill Peduto for mayor, too.
He doesn’t get why I voted for Cathleen Bubash, but fully concurs with my choices of McVay, McCarthy, and Williams, for judge of Allegheny Court of Common Pleas.
He thinks Len Bodack is not a nice man, and that he should concede to Patrick Dowd before the county verifies the race results. After all, he is convinced that Patrick won.
And he’s very glad Heather Arnet will take Patrick’s seat on the school board, because it’s really important who’s on the school board since he goes to the public schools and they run the public schools.
And shouldn’t we take our yard signs down now that the primaries are over?
Why don’t people take down their Bodack signs now that he lost?
He just doesn’t GET IT.

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I am beginning to prefer the company of my goldfish, who may be boring but at least he stays in one place, and he’s quiet.

Except lately, even he’s been making these weird “bloop, bloop, bloop” bubbly sounds...