Playing Possum

YOU CAN’T FOOL ME!

It’s been about two weeks since my high schoolers had a full day of school. Apparently in the current educational climate if a high school student has been in attendance most of the time, and has a score above a certain percentage then they are exempt from taking their final exam. Unless they attend school the day the exam is given, then they must take the exam with the rest of the kids, needless to say mine were home for a really long time and ate a lot, I digress. Of course last week being the end of the grading period the kids had off Monday and Tuesday of this week so that the teachers could do grades? Or attend a workshop? -I’m not sure. Regardless, today was the first day this week that all three of my children would be back on their school schedule and being that I am runner-up for mother of the year (a joke of course) I wanted them all in bed last night (with lights out) by ten pm. This may sound silly, but they seem to gravitate toward being wholly nocturnal when they are not on a school schedule, which I try not to take personally, and so it is necessary for me to bring them back to the daylight with incremental modification of their sleep habits.

I noticed something odd at about 10:20 pm; the house was silent. So I got up to say ‘good night’ to my children since they seemed to be sneaking to bed. I opened the door to my daughters’ room which was dark except for the glow of my eldest female offspring’s iPod. She would have known I was coming if she didn’t have her headphones on and wasn’t watching past episodes of Desperate Housewives on Netflix. So I smiled and held out my hand, she took off the headphones and handed me the iPod, then I said, “cell phone please.” Which she produced from under her covers, but before placing it my hand she had to send a final text to whomever she was communicating with. Meanwhile about 2 feet from where I stood is my youngest , a sweet child in middle school who appears to be pretending to be asleep already -only because she wasn’t wearing headphones and therefore heard my approach. I turn to her and say, “where is your iPod and cell phone My Love (sometimes I call her that)?” She responds almost too quickly, I really thought she might try to play the-pretend-sleeper a bit longer, but no, she tells me her things are on the floor next to her bed. So she snatches them up post-haste to hand them to me, but first she must shoot off one final text to whomever she was kvetching (I assume) with, at, to… I smile at our playful routine. They know that I have a rule ‘no more iPods or cell phones after 10 pm’ and if we had been on our normal school schedule they might turn them in or I might have to collect them, it depends on whether or not they think I might coming down with an early case of dementia. (I think again, -I’m just guessing at their motivation really)

I go to my son’s room next. He is entirely motionless and it’s completely dark in his room. Could it be that he is sleeping? I walk to his bedside to find out; I have to get very close in the dark to see, so I lean down and discover that he too is wearing headphones. I give him the benefit of the doubt and think perhaps he was listening to music and fell asleep. So I attempt to find the place where the headphones are connected to his iPod. I feel the thin strand of rubber coated wire, but cant seem to find the source. I’m groping in the dark quite a while when I think I notice a slight quaking, but I persevere in the name of a quality night’s sleep and then I feel it again -the quaking and I realize he is giggling. I too start to giggle and say, “give it to me you little devil.” Low and behold what does he produce from a place between his chest and his pillow? His iPod playing a movie on Netflix. I ask for his phone and he hands it to me. I tell him good night and I wander back to my bedroom with a large enough handful of technological booty to disturb the sleep of three very intelligent young people. I smile at my contraband and then I hear my daughters talking. Yes they do that if they aren’t wearing headphones and texting their friends at 10:20 pm on  school night.

The takeaway: I love being a parent and sometimes that means making the unpopular decisions for the health of my children. The funny thing is they expect that from me. It doesn’t mean they won’t try to ‘get away with murder’ if I let them, but they aren’t arguing either.