I told this story to some friends, and one of them said it HAS to be here on the blog. So here it is, from 2 nights ago:

Sheesh. I was in the middle of trying to figure out a rather complex problem on the computer, and Hubby was sleeping on the couch. The Mercenary came in and started chattering at me. I told him nicely that I couldn’t listen right now because I was trying to solve this problem.

So he kept chattering.

I told him again, I can’t listen right now, he’ll have to talk to me later. He goes away.

Then he comes back to show me what he was chattering about. I drag my attention away from the computer, look him in the eye, and tell him again: I can’t listen right now, I’m busy frowning at the computer. Talk to me later.

He keeps chattering. I finally told him flat out to go away. As nicely as I could.

Meanwhile, the 4 year olds get into some kind of spat and start shouting so Hubby calls out to them to knock it off. Since he’s awake I go out and tell him the problem and ask for help. While this is going on, my pastor is calling me on the phone every 5 minutes wondering how I’m doing solving the problem, btw.

Finally the phone rings again, this time it’s the pastor’s wife. She wants to chat. So we chat, while Hubby is trying to find the missing e-mail and I’m still hitting send/receive over and over.

The e-mail I’m looking for shows up. I signal Hubby that he doesn’t have to help anymore, and finish conversation with friend. Start working on next part of problem (trying to register for some things on a deadline here).

That’s when Hubby STARTS TO CHATTER AT ME.

I decided it wasn’t respectful to tell him to go away, so I tried to listen politely while he was chattering about some story he’d heard from some expert on child rearing. When I didn’t respond (because I’m still pulling my hair out over the stupid bleepity bleep registration process), he tells me he’ll talk to me later when I can pay attention, and he’s not mad at me.

He’s not mad at ME?????????

He asks what’s for dinner, so I tell him. Somewhere in there I thought to ask him to look at it and make sure it’s done cooking. Also I wanted to serve leftovers tonight.

So he goes to the fridge, pulls out every container he can find…brings them into the bedroom, and asks me to sort through which ones we’re going to serve.

Mind you, I’m going on 3 hours sleep right now. Woke up this morning and couldn’t get back down so I finally just got back up.

Hopefully there won’t be any interesting headlines on the nightly news.

Update: After I’d calmed down a bit, I told Hubby what had gone on with the kids….chattering….phone calls, while he was sleeping. When he heard the whole story he seemed to understand better why I wasn’t really interested in his story right at that time.

What I was trying to do was sign the church up for an eBay account to buy some piece of recording equipment that the pastor found and it was a really good deal. Of course, I was trying to set up accounts on my laptop and was remotely connected to the church computer with Hubby working from the desktop to access the church web site to see if there was a problem. The auction was already underway, and dinner was in the oven and the stupid confirmation e-mail just wouldn’t show up. It took me an hour to figure out how much to bid, get the eBay and PayPal accounts opened, and get the bid in. Sigh.

The good news is we won the auction and got it for a really great price. And no one was permanently injured in the process.

Earnest Parenting: advice for keeping family members alive when they’re annoying.

Image courtesy of Wendy via Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.