Everytime I am on the phone...

Every time I answer a phone call,  it's basically a get out of jail free card for my kids.  All bad behavior becomes untouchable, uncontrollable, and unavoidable. This post is about how I handle my children when on the phone.  Imagine a living room devoid of furniture and littered with toys.  It's the witching hour.  Personalities are starting to intensify, no one likes each other right now as we wait impatiently for dinner...the phone rings...like an idiot, I answer it. Let the games begin.

Now that I am distracted, Sedric's pent up man energy gets the best of him, he attacks Rafe.  She falls to the floor with Sedric wrapped around her torso like a sarong.  He bumps his chin on her shoulder in the kerfuffle...its his fault, but he pulls Rafe's hair for punishment for making him (his perspective) bump his chin while he pummeled her and sent her to the ground like a felled tree.  
Rafe is enraged and using her zombie Apocalypse shriek to make her displeasure known.
I have been on the phone for 60 sec at this point and I already have forgotten who I am talking to and from which I deduct: there will be no meaningfully expressed words coming from my end of the conversation today, just randomly muttered "uh-huh's" at any pause in the conversation as I dodge the dead spots in our suburban home while my children evoke each other to murderous rage and mischief.
The kids are in crisis mode.  They begin hoarding food from the pantry.  Sedric has climbed to top cupboard shelves and is liberating the fruit snacks and gold fish.  Our kitchen is raining snack food.  The girls are dancing and singing Sedric's praises below as food adorns their Afros.  I'm running between the living room where the baby is laying on the floor in a sea of toys and the kitchen where the older kids are acting like desert island survivors.  I storm into the kitchen flailing my free arm snapping my fingers and posturing my displeasure with a savage stink eye trying not to interrupt the person (I still can't remember their name) on the phone.  The children scatter...or do they?  I walk back to the living room feeling powerful and in control and naively think I may be able to salvage this conversation after all...NAIVE.  All is quiet...not a good sign.  I get back up off the floor where I am playing with the baby and walk back into the kitchen...the pantry doors are open.  The fruit snacks are missing.  The gold fish are missing...CRAP.  Luck for me, my kids aren't good at covering their tracks yet...I follow the trail of fallen crushed food to the family room where they are sitting behind the couch in the window laughing at their completed caper.  They are munching loudly.  I appear very unexpectedly over the back of the couch.  The children are taken aback.  They are now choking and crying from displeasure and surprise as I rip the snack boxes out of their grubby little hands and throw them back into the pantry.  They are really upset now...hind sight, I should have just fed them and turned the TV on...but, like an idiot, I didn't. 
Peniel begins asking me questions I can't answer for obvious reasons:  I AM ON THE PHONE. She wants to know when we can go to the store to buy ingredients to make perfume and the go to Home Depo to buy metal to make a perfume making machine...I keep shaking my head at her as if to say, "I have no idea!"  She is getting frustrated with me and storms off to gather her thoughts before coming back to assault me with them.  The baby is now beginning to fuss so I pick her up and bounce her.  It's not helping.  I begin to scour the floor with my feet in search of her binky...no luck, so I bounce her faster, she burps and spits up down my shirt and all over the carpet...CRAP.  I have completely forgotten at this point that I am on the phone with someone...I mumble, "dang it!"  under my breath as I accidentally step in the puddle of spit up.  I almost drop the phone in surprise when I hear a concerned person in my ear ask, "is everything ok over there?"  What?  Is that you God?  I lie and say, "Of course everything is fine!  Now, what were you saying?"  The uh-huh conversation resumes.  The baby is demanding her dinner by violently grabbing my shirt and head butting me in the chest...subtle as a train wreck.  Peniel returns.  She has something to say.  She begins telling me how I lied to her last year when I told her I would buy her a canvas so she could paint, and she still didn't have one so I have ruined her dream of being an artist...AND ruined her dream of being a perfume maker...I think she had a picture of herself in her head as a scientist in a white lab coat, wearing goggles brewing and pouring concoctions into a sea of beakers with one hand and painting pictures of horses with her other hand...and I was ruining it all!  I whisper to her, "I'll help you become famous later...but not right now, I'M ON THE PHONE."  Sedric and Rafe paddle into the room and collapse on the floor complaining about wanting dinner.  The room is getting too loud but there is no where to go BECAUSE THEY WILL JUST FOLLOW ME and there are too many dead spots in the quieter places in our home, it's all working against me...the baby is soaking my shirt with baby slime growling at me for her dinner, Peniel is still recounting her grievances, and Sedric and Rafe are whining...and the person on the phone is still nameless!  OY VEY.  I interrupt the nameless person on the phone to express my apologies for being distracted during our conversation only to realize I had stepped into the dead zone and lost the call...CRAP.  The kicker is, I still couldn't remember who I was talking to so I could call them back!!  Oh well, I tried.  I put down the phone in defeat, shake my head and sigh, all the while I am thinking, "I promise to never again answer the phone while the kids are awake."