Fiddling While Rome Burns

My recent posts have all been variations on a theme: the theme of being driven completely batshit crazy by small children while living in a rain forest. Well, I regret to inform you that this post is no exception. On rainy weekends punctuated by brief periods of sunlight, the havoc wreaked by Paige and Isaac is my blogging muse. Things get pretty tense during the fifteen minutes in which we try to leave the house on days like this. The chaos and anxiety rise to a level on par with large numbers of people evacuating a crowded tropical island shortly after a Tsunami warning. There is frantic searching for missing footwear; arguments about the weather; unauthorized building with Legos; and incessant pleas for granola bars and cheese sticks.

It's at this point that both my husband and I usually like to go to our respective happy places. Geoff picks up the guitar and starts noodling away in passive aggressive denial, adding yet another layer of sound to the cacophony. And I like to pull what I call a "Demi Moore in St. Elmo's Fire." '80s cinema buffs will recall the unsettling scene in that film where Demi Moore's character has hit rock bottom, and Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez intervene to extract her from a vacant apartment in Georgetown. Dressed only in lingerie, she sits behind the door, rocking back and forth with her legs tucked up into her chest and her head between her knees, muttering incomprehensibly to herself.

Replace the lingerie with a hoodie sweatshirt and pajama pants, and the vacant Georgetown apartment with a darkened Juneau bedroom, and you have the idea. So basically what I'm saying is that Geoff is staring into space playing "Friend of the Devil" and I'm having a nervous breakdown in a closet while our children systematically dismantle everything we've worked to provide them in life. It's a tranquil note on which to transition from activity to activity, and here's the best part: it happens EVERY day! To each of you who now has the theme song to St. Elmo's Fire stuck in your head, you're welcome.