Good Night Everybody

You know those holograms that every future show has that are so life like people fall in love, forget themselves and can even die as a result of entering into the false reality so completely.  I want one of those for my house.  I don't want it because I need more excitement in my life, or because I can't easily travel to far off exotic locales.  I want it so I can project a large Bengal tiger parked just outside my children's bedrooms. 

The tiger will only come out at night.  I will give out the notice that it will eat the first child that comes out of their room after nine.  It's not that they can't hang from the chandeliers and read until their eyeballs collapse, it's that I don't want to see or hear from people under the age of 21 after 21 hundred hours.  Mom is closed.  She's done. She's tired and she doesn't want commentary on if she's using the computer, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream or slumming watching on demand cooking shows.  She wants off hours and from 9 o'clock to 5 a.m, it's the equivalent of Mom miller time.  All children wandering shall be fed to the tiger. 

I know, that sounds harsh, but it's not like I haven't tried.  Even when we've done the whole routine of stories and tooth brushing and prayers and I love yous as I turn out the lights and tuck in people, I've still been forced to play the parent equivalent of whack-a-mole.  They're inventive about this business.  My children come up or downstairs as the case may be for water, toothbrushes, to have me kill a stink bug, remind me to make cookies for tomorrow, to get a towel or a shirt for the next day, to pack their back pack with their homework that I'd been asking them to pack for the past four hours, to tell me what they forgot to say all during the day when I'd asked how their day was, to use the bathroom, to show me a bruise they got on the playground three days ago that they just noticed, or that they've lost one of their shoes, ripped their pants and that their little sister is snoring.   That's just today's sampling. 

But since that might be frowned upon by modern parenting standards, I'll settle for a holographic version of reality for just me, a faux version of my own house with the clock reading 9:01 pm, and all the kids either in their rooms or asleep....ahhh...the soothing unreality of unrealized dreams of people dreaming projected in real time.  Nobody pinch me.