The Bird

My husband coaches my son's football team a few nights a week so on those nights I have solo dinnertime/bathtime duty.

Tonight, I brought the 6,5 and 3 year olds upstairs as soon as they left and gave them showers.  Then we went back downstairs and I made dinner.  The 4 of us sat together discussing our days and talking about random things.  Then I served icecream for dessert.  And then the phone rang.

I recognized the phone number as the HR representative I've been working with at the company I REALLY want to work for.  I said to the children, "This is a work call.  I am going to take it upstairs.  PLEASE be quiet."

I know this wouldn't work for most kids but I work from home quite a bit so my children SHOULD understand what that means.

Of course halfway through the call my 3 year old burst into my room calling for me.  I managed to mute my phone.  Yes, it was 7pm but I've been trying to refrain from mentioning my children to my future employer.  It's not that I want to hide them - one of their employees asked me if I had children and what their ages are and I readily admitted that I do and since I listed 4 ages he can probably guess how many. ;)  Still I'm trying to keep it out of the conversation since a lot of people think HOLY SHIT FOUR CHILDREN? HAVEN'T YOU FIGURED OUT WHAT CAUSES IT YET?

(No lie, people have said that to me.)

ANYWAY, Imanaged to keep my daughter quiet-ish throughout the call - although the HR rep did mention how "Family Friendly" the company was. 

When we'd finally hung up, I took my daughter by the hand to lead her back downstairs.  I was ranting a little, "When I'm on a work call you CANNOT interrupt.  It's VERY important for mommy to be on the phone.  That was a very IMPORTANT call..."

I was on a roll with no sign of stopping when she interrupted me.  "Mommy?" she asked, then continued, "Is this the middle finger?" She held up her little hand with 4 fingers bent down and the 1 in the middle standing proud.  I knew exactly what she was saying.

"Yes." I said. "It is.

Comments

[Becky]

Wait so what happened with the call? Did they make you an offer? You left us hanging!!!

[Paxochka]

Bwahaha I love the dragon slayer :)

[Kate]

My boyfriend & I occasionally play host to his five neices & nephews (not at the same time, lest he never wants to have sex with me again). Although I very rarely have any important calls when I'm not at work, having no kids myself yet means that I'm totally thrown off by the amount of noise they can make when I'm trying to have any kind of phone conversation around them. Since I'm not mom, & definitely want to retain "Cool Aunt Kate" status, I manage to avoid using the scary voice I use with the dog to tell them to "EFFING BE QUIET ALREADY". So, my new trick is to very calmly ask the pizza guy to hold, turn to kids & inform them that I'm speaking with Santa, because (and I only had to explain this once), Santa calls aunts & uncles to check up on little boys' and girls' behavior, since he knows that their moms and dads are sometimes too used to their kids to be able to give him an honest status update. I then take the phone into the other room to wrap up my conversation so as to avoid questions like, "why were you telling Santa what public drive folder he could find the payroll report in?". God, I'm SO gonna rock this motherhood thing out.