Watching a movie used to be a simple thing. You pop in the tape, or the dvd, and kick back and enjoy the movie.
What the parenting books never tell you is that past the age of two, watching a movie is never the same. First, unless you are watching Barney Goes to Camp 3, you need to wait until the kids are in bed.
The kids will know something's up and come out every five minutes, forcing you to pause the movie to frog march them back into their rooms.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was hard enough to follow, without pausing it every five minutes for bedtime identification. You end up either turning the movie off, or making threats along the lines of, "If you come out of that room one more time, I'm selling you to the gypsies!"
As the kids get older, you get the bright idea to set up a movie for the kids in another part of the house, often on the home computer. You will discover that the kids get bored with their movie shortly after the lion roars, or by the end of the Pixar short, and will begin bickering.
This will cause you to pause your movie 682 times to shout, "Stop that bickering!"
"But she started it!"
"Do I have to come in there?!"
It gets even better once the kids learn to very quietly sneak into the kitchen during the movie to make new and exciting taste sensations such as "chocolate tuna surprise".
You are actually enjoying The Spy Who Shagged Me, until you hear a loud thump and a voice cry, "Hurry! I think they're coming!"
You look at each other, and one fumbles with the remote to pause the movie while the other goes upstairs to discover an entire gallon of milk hit the floor, and glug-glug-glugged under the fridge and stove.
The cost of two theatre tickets, popcorn, soda, and a babysitter is insignificant compared to the actual cost of trying to watch the same movie at home on dvd for a dollar.
Ron asks me why I won't watch movies downstairs with him in the evenings, and why I choose to sit at the kitchen table on my laptop. It's not that I don't enjoy watching movies, but that the price is just too high.
By the time I have paused the movie several times in order to kill the children for fighting, and chase them out of the kitchen, I return to the movie only to have it paused three minutes later because Ron has to pee. Ron, who has a bladder of steel when at work, has a bladder the size of a walnut while watching a movie. Even after I insist that he pee before we start the movie, he will pause the movie twice during the 90 minutes of movie time, to pee. One might think he could use one of the bickering breaks to pee, but apparently his bladder wants a time all to itself. But I digress.
I stay in the kitchen to guard the food, and prevent the messes. It preserves my sanity.
So... Sadie is finally old enough to watch Love Actually with me, so the plan today was for us to watch it downstairs during the day, while the younger kids stayed upstairs and ate sandwiches, checked their facebooks, went outside to play in the snow, talked on the phone, played with their gazillions of toys, or (gasp!) played a board game. Ron was home, and working out in the garage, right off the kitchen, if the kids needed anything.
Twice during the movie I had to pause it to threaten them for standing near the stairs and shouting to each other and singing obnoxiously, and loudly enough that we couldn't hear the movie. I was pretty pissed about that kind of disrespect, because they knew how I felt about this moment... but nothing could have prepared me for what I would find when I returned upstairs 135 minutes later.
The kids had gone through a gallon of eggnog. They had also gotten into the institutional-size container of hot cocoa mix and used every mug in the house to make themselves several mugs of cocoa each, complete with all the sloshing and dripping. Then they'd gotten the brilliant idea to put marshmallow fluff into the mugs of cocoa, but managed to get it on the counters, the fronts of the drawers and cabinets, all over the table, on the chairs and dripping off the chair legs, onto the floor, and then tracked all over the floor.
Tessa saw my face and began trying to clean up the marshmallow fluff mess with a dry paper towel.
There are no pictures of the Marshmallow Fluff Mess, because I was not able to properly handle a camera at that point because my hands would have been shaking.
However, I had left the kitchen 135 minutes earlier with the dishes done up...
The sugar container full...
And had told Paige to empty the trash...
I threw all the kids out of the kitchen, and confiscated their computer.
After that, I cleaned. I scrubbed with the hottest water I could stand. I mopped twice. I loaded the dishwasher, ran it, and washed the rest by hand. I wiped down every fluff-engooed, cocoa-dripped, and eggnog-filmed surface I could see.
While I was scrubbing the kitchen, Sadie approached me and asked if could drive her to her boyfriend's house, so she could spend Christmas Eve with his family (!).
My grip tightened on the soapy rag. Using the heel of my hand, I pushed my hair off my sweaty forehead and unleashed a torrent of christmas cheer that could melt the snow right off our metal roof.
Some of you might be asking why I did not make the children clean up this mess. You are asking this because 1. you do not have children (and it is my hope this story helps keep it that way), 2. you do have children, but your children are age 3 or under, or 3. your children are grown and gone from the home.
Because a mom with real kids actively living in the home would know that I would spend two hours of my life standing over the children, cracking the whip, while the children would each begin proclaiming their innocence and the unfairness of forcing them clean a mess they did not make.
They would then begin fighting while cleaning, ending with one of them shooting another with 409, point blank in the face.
15 minutes into it, one or more would be on the floor, whining about how tired they were from 'all that work'.
Enter the disability: the sore back, the bum leg, the bellyache, the headache, the elbow that can mysteriously not bend...
Forcing them to work with their 'disability' will cause them to 'accidentally' knock over the bucket of water, all over the hardwood.
When that happens, my instinct is to start spanking, but I know if I do, I won't stop until I'm not mad anymore. It's better to send them to their rooms and remove the computer, until I'm not mad anymore.
And ultimately, instead of cleaning up the 'sticky', they would just smear it around, and I'd still have to clean it up.
I hope Sadie enjoyed the movie. I probably won't have the energy to watch another one any time soon.
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