Simpsons fans can sing along. Use the “Itchy and Scratchy” theme song as your model.

Between house-hunting, packing, our looming move and the loss, this summer has not been one for the kids’ highlight reels. We haven’t had much old-fashioned summertime fun, except our short trip to Grand Junction over Memorial Day weekend. Aidan went to camp. We watched fireworks. That has been it.

We didn’t sign the kids up for any activities or lessons because we didn’t know where we would be, and when. It would have been a nightmare to live 30 miles one-way from daily swim lessons, or 20 miles from soccer practice. Consequently, we have had a lot of close together time. And it isn’t going well.

While the kids truly love each other and play well most of the time, their fighting has been escalating. Hubby and I helped the situation by purchasing two Light Sabers for Sam’s birthday. Now the screeching, name-calling, and tug-of-wars over toys has been enhanced by the ability to conk each other on the head with big plastic retractable sticks.

Their worst form of fighting has become name calling. I do not like name calling and I swoop in when I hear it. Tommy is our most hardened repeat name-calling offender and always has been. When he was still in diapers, he called his siblings “Dipah!” when they did things he didn’t like. When he graduated to underwear, we noticed his insults graduated too: “You’re an underwear!”

Lately, he has adopted a new withering insult to end all insults. A scenario:

Aidan is standing in front of the TV when the Wiggles are asking the timeless question “Can you point your fingers and do the twist?”

Tommy can’t properly follow the choreography. He gets increasingly agitated. Rather than saying, “Aidan, could you please move so I can see?” his three-year-old brain has formulated a new way to get attention…

“Aidan! You are a Diet Coke!”

She will turn around and say “huh?”

“You are a Diet Coke!”

She shrugs her shoulders and moves.

You know Tommy is mad when the words “Diet” and “Coke” are launched in one of his siblings general direction. It is an area of his behavior I am struggling with nipping in the bud. It is like having to nip an entire oak tree at this point. Why couldn’t he have picked a more classic insult, like “poopy-head” or “booger”? The other kids would become angrier, he would see those names do not get his intended result, and perhaps he would knock it off. They would inform me, so that I could put Tommy in a time out or take away his toys. They love to tattle if the word “poop” is involved.

But when he calls them a Diet Coke, you can tell they are mentally scratching their heads before they surrender, just because they can’t decide if being a Diet Coke is truly horrible.

“Diet Coke” works. And that is why it is so hard to get Tommy to stop being such a…Diet Coke.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, when not busy worrying about my coffee maker spontaneously combusting at the stroke of midnight or how I would deal with being hurtled back to the dark ages, I thought about the new baby riding around inside of me. I knew my baby would be a Y2K babe and wondered what that would mean for him or her. Changing diapers made out of leaves by the light of a rationed match? Would his or her newborn portrait be sketched onto the wall of a cave? Would I be washing his or her poopy-blowout onesies in Clear Creek?

Actually, I was pretty confident that our toaster would properly burn my bagel in the morning. My worries were bigger than the ridiculous speculations of the day. My Y2K baby was our third child. That was bigger, to me, than the possibility our answering machine would eat our outgoing message.

None of the doom and gloom Y2K predictions came true, of course. And none of the dire predictions I had formulated about how hard it would be to have three kids ages three (barely) and under came true, either. I found that Sam settled into our family and routine with greater ease than I dared to imagine.

I can’t imagine life without our sweet, funny, intense, whimsical Sammy-Ball. Happy Birthday to our brand-new five year old.