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." 

Blackeyed Beauty

I was having one of those "fun" days with my kids...letting them run buck-wild all day, watch cartoons all day, eat too much junk all day, have bad manners all day...I was too tired to captain the ship that day...now that I think about it, my 2 year old was naked all day...it was one of those days.  Normally, I would write off that kind of day, file it away under HOT MESS, and move on...this day was slightly harder to file away...
My 3 year old loves to put on makeup, layer upon layer until the face is no longer recognizable as being human.  Today, I was her victim.  She spent an hour brushing my hair, ripping my hair out with every stroke and repeatedly saying, "this is gonna hurt."  She was right.  Once she achieved the perfect comb-over that started from my left ear and stretched unnaturally to my right ear, she then turned her thorough eye to doing my makeup.  She fancied the purple eye shadow today.  I never looked in the mirror...not once.  While she was beautifying my tortured hair with butterfly clips and making my skin burn from all the makeup application and then rough, swift removal after each stroke of the lip gloss wand and cheap worn out eye shadow sponge, I received a text from a lady responding to my Craigslist ad...I am selling a couch.  She wanted to come see it today, I told her to come on over.  She said she would be there in 15 mins...I got up, I thanked my 3 yr old for the quality time, then I went downstairs...
I walked past my 6 yr old, she smiled at me, I smiled back.
I walked past my 2 yr old, he asked me for a snack, I said no, he threw a fit, I didn't care, I was selling a couch.
I walked past MY HUSBAND...HE SAID NOTHING.
The doorbell rings.
I answer it.
The lady looks at me with a peculiar look on her face.
I smile and chat her up, as is my custom when I sell things.
I show her the couch.
She says its nice, but keeps looking at me with a furrowed brow.
I wonder what her problem is...
She says she needs to think about the couch.
She looks at me one more time before leaving...it was awkward.
I walk back in the house, have a 5 MIN CONVERSATION WITH MY HUSBAND about something I can't remember.
I realize I need to go to the bathroom.
I walk into the bathroom and sit down.
I look up into the mirror.
I scream! 
What stared back at me was reminiscent of a movie I had recently watched...
I looked like the gum smacking blueberry girl from Willy Wonka...the heavy purple eye shadow ALL. OVER. MY FACE.!!  I was completely purple.
SPEECHLESS.
How did this happen?!
Embarrassed is too friendly a word for what I feel.
Begin blame shifting IMMEDIATELY!
I storm out of the bathroom with thunder and lightening in my steps and yell at my husband, "JACK!  How did you not notice?!!!"
He sat on the couch, mouth agape, dumbfounded as he stares at me...revelation slowly dawning in his eyes...he then says, "UMMM, I don't...WAIT, how did YOU not notice?!"
TOUCHE...but I don't tell him that, instead...
My eyes narrow, I purse my lips into a duck face getting ready to have a conniption.
The children sense the tension.
They stop what they are doing.
They stare.
Even the dog stares.
I take an exaggerated, deep, calming, breath, secretly knowing it won't work on this level of outrage, but I PRETEND it works because the kids are watching...
A forced smile appears on my face...
I change the subject with, "Who wants pizza for dinner?"
The children cheer.
I give my husband one more dirty look, just in case he thought I was done being mad at him.

As you my have already guessed,  I did not sell the couch.
I did not speak to my husband for an hour.
I did set a good example for my kids...SORTA.
I did not cry about it, even though I wanted to.
I did laugh about it though...but only after my prescription M&M's kicked in.


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