No Cereal

At one point today, I found myself sitting dead center on the living room floor almost in awe of the chaos.
The dog spun by,
Toys were everywhere,
And Paige was busy dunking our brand new home phone into the pool;
An act that has us down one handset.


I was focusing on the carpet asking myself what the 10 pieces of plastic shrapnel were from, and was that BLOOD on them,
when from the front room I heard Tessa gruffly whisper,
"I don't know. I guess we have to do it back there. Go ask Mama."

In came Chloe.

When Chloe comes in
especially with this particular look,
it usually means one of two things:
She's either about to ask if she can sleep in your bed that night because of some sudden-onset malady,
or about to tell some egregious act that Tessa committed and continue looking at you that exact way until you do something about it.
And that something had better be good and punish-y.

I was relieved when I was predicting wrong, because frankly, I'm tired of her in my bed,
but that happy feeling only lasted a moment.


CHLOE: "Mama, how do you spell 'CEREAL?"

My brain drifted before I answered.

Hmmmm. Cereal. Could we just do THAT for dinner? I HATE having to think of what we're having for dinner. We could, like, do a cereal BUFFET...
Tacos? No. We had that a couple nights ago....
I'm so tired of chicken...

CHLOE: "Mama? CEREAL?"
ME: "Oh. It's C.E.R.E.A.L."

She looked confused.

ME: "Why? Why are you asking?" I questioned.

CHLOE: "Because on the table in the front room it says 'No Cereal,' and I'm wondering about it."

ME: "What do you mean on the table it says 'No Cereal?' You mean, like a NOTE is on the table?"

CHLOE: "No. And we didn't write it. I promise. We didn't."

From the front room a panicked sounding Tessa, ever the self-defender yelled,
"We did NOT write this. Really. Really we did NOT do it. I didn't do it. I know I did NOT do THIS!"

The only thing I could think was that Justin, in his recent prescription steroid induced cleaning/organizing frenzy had written some sort of psychotic Dad Note demanding that no more cereal be eaten in the front room ever ever again.

And I was no stranger to the Dad Note.
Growing up, ours was always taped to the television before sunrise with packaging tape. (Why did we never have NORMAL tape?)
It was always some list of things to do that day that always included some bizarre sounding task like "Mend the hole the Emu made."
Bizarre if you didn't grow up in my house.

I wouldn't put it past Justin, either. He was as prone to a weird Dad Note as the rest of them.

He was always declaring that no more food was ever ever ever to be eaten in the van/bedroom/front room/back yard/garage ever ever ever again.
Ever.
He declared these types of things at the end of an hour of freeing See's lollipops from car interior,
or after an hour of being elbow deep in some dark crevasse that housed shells or husks or pits.
He declared,
then the eating resumed within a max of two days.

Strange I hadn't seen any note.

He had definitely looked at me sideways when I allowed the girls to eat fudgecicles in there the other day as they jumped couch to couch like tribesmen.

It caused beads of sweat to congregate on his upper lip if anyone took milk ANYWHERE without a lid besides three steps from the refrigerator.

Milk in the CAR?!
You might as well just disembowel him Braveheart style.

Maybe he'd just had enough of soggy mystery items stuck to various armrests, and had written Rules for the Front Room and posted them.

Strange that he hadn't mentioned it, though...
He loves mentioning rules...

"Where is the note laying?" I asked.

CHLOE: "It's not LAYING anywhere, Mama. There's no note on paper. It's actually written ON the table. On the actual table someone wrote it."

Even in a crevasse digging rage, Justin would not have written on the furniture. Unless it was the roids. I was a little worried about the roids...

"In, like, PEN?!" I asked.
Oh man.
This was NOT going to go over well.
Now there was writing on the furniture?!
Justin would need cognitive therapy.

Paige had written on the back of the couch with a sharpie a few months ago and that had caused him to try to ban the very color the ink was made of.
No amount of strategic vase placement was going to cover up the words "NO CEREAL" written on our coffee table forever.

ME: "Did one of you guys do it? Did you guys write on the table?!"

CHLOE: "Mama! No. It's written on the bottom of the table. Tessa turned the table over (We won't even ask why THAT happened)
and that's when we saw the note.
There's also another part about 'No style.'
Tessa says we can't do our Barbie's hair on the table anymore."

ME: "No STYLE?......."

*lightbulb*


OMG.



ME: "Chloe........ Does it say 'S-E-R-I-A-L NO.' and 'STYLE NO."

CHLOE: "Yeah. That's what I said. No Cereal."