This is the End.

I don't want to be too Chicken Little-ish about this--but the end is near.

This is how I know--it's 7:28 AM. I already want to kill my kids.

This is how it started:
S runs around with Clooney--the time is barely 6 AM. They are chasing each other around my bed, on to my bed, off of my bed, around the corner, up the stairs, down the stairs over and under the table downstairs. (Wonder why S always has stitches in his head?) Finally, at some point, I asked if they could not thump quite so hard on the floor.

Immediately after: the heaviest rope toy we have thumped down 14 stairs.

E comes in and asks me to cut a watermelon for him. I ask about the time. It's 6:35. Who, besides a starving child in Somalia, needs a fresh watermelon cut for him before 7 AM? Mind you, I bought special chocolate chip muffins for the kids so they could obtain their own butt-crack-of-dawn breakfast specials. They can have a nosh and then I'll make a healthier breakfast when I wake up. Or not. But fresh cut fruit waited until 7:17. At which point, I had to beg E to put down his book and eat his much desired watermelon.

He ate two cubes and went back to his book.

Sometime during the cutting of the watermelon, S screams like a girl. I run in, expecting profuse amounts of blood, and find only a cockroach (a large one, the size of a small hummingbird) twitching, gasping in the throes of death and under intense scrutiny from S. E, shrieking like a diva, has already left the room. S is contemplating the thick body, the 'very fragilest antennae' and the desperate, uneven spasm of the legs. E said he wouldn't leave his bed perch until the thing was gone. S said we shouldn't get rid of it that it was 'intgergesting.'

I smacked it and flushed it. End of cockroach.

In the interim, S has had a hugely high fever since Friday. We fought it all day Friday, and yesterday it flared up in the afternoon, as fevers often do. This morning, the poor thing is covered head to toe in a rash. He often gets these towards the end of a virus, but they itch him nonetheless. I sprayed some Benadryl on there and ohmygod, you have never heard such a sound. Apparently, the skin is raw or he's been scratching, or it's not the kind of rash you should spray Benadryl on. But he was hopping and whimpering and screaming, and writhing. (Kinda like the cockroach, actually) I'm blowing and shh-ing and blowing and shh-ing.


In the end, I gave him some liquid Benadryl. Which, I am sure, is only going to succeed in making me drowsy.

So, now it's 7:44 and they've fought about where they're going to play. And what they're going to play. And the dog is tuckered out from the chase of this morning. And now I'm up. And the day has begun.

But it's one of the last, I promise. The Apocalypse will not be ushered in by four horsemen. It will be brought, kicking and screaming, by my two boys trying to ride an 11 pound dog, wanting a ridiculously sweet snack.