Don't come a knockin'

I've officially been a stay at home mom for a year now and  I am either starting to be kind of ok at it, or my insanity has reached such a level that I just think that I'm ok at it.  One of the most surprising things about being at home all day is the enormous fleet of door-to-door foot traffic that happens during the afternoons. The Baptists, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have all come on a mission to get us to heaven and I've turned down people selling magazines, pest control, lawn control, and among other things, MEAT.  I honestly don't know why anyone would ever buy meat from a random stranger who comes to your door but apparently it happens a lot because the meat sales people are still in business.  Any time one of these people comes to my door it sets off my dogs and they start barking like we are being robbed, which then upsets/wakes up the babies so they start screaming and I end up climbing over a mountain of barking dogs and crying babies to get to the door just to tell some sketchy dude that no, I do not want his meat/magazines/Jesus and it takes me a good hour to after they leave to get everyone calmed down again, and my kids sure as hell aren't going to go back to sleep.

Anyway, I thought I would stop this problem by using my previous passive-aggressive-office-post-it skills and posting this simple sign over my doorbell:

Of course I was so, so wrong in thinking that these people would get the hint and just turn around when they saw my sign.  Nope, apparently if you are asked not to ring the doorbell then you just knock on the door in  your quest to sell/save. So then, in addition to the sign over the doorbell, I put up this sign:

I thought it was witty and cute and a good way to say "thanks, but no thanks" to the porch pilgrims.

This sign however, did not serve its intended purpose. In fact, I think it just gave the door-to-door people a challenge to overcome.  The first person who disobeyed my request was a tweaker named Timmy from a company called Coastal Concept Sales. Timmy actually acknowledged my sign and told me how funny it was but  that he wasn't "selling anything" and was there to help our troops by collecting money to send them care packages. So while Timmy is giving me his pitch, talking at about 100 miles an hour and having a hard time staying on subject,  Luke is standing in the door with me only wearing a diaper alternating between demanding pizza and saying "bye bye"and trying to leave while Lily is in her swing screaming her head off.  So because I am a softy and I just wanted the guy to freakin leave, I gave Timmy 40 bucks and sent him on his troop-helping way.  It was only after he'd left that I got onto my computer to figure out that the whole thing is a scam. Coastal Concept Sales is a shady for-profit company that may not have ever sent a single care package to our troops but nobody knows because they keep changing their name and they don't report financials  So that ticked me off, you know, just a little.

The second offence was even more infuriating. It was a Saturday morning and Mike was on about day 13 of being out of town and somehow I'd got both of my kids to take a nap at the exact same time which is a HUGE victory in mom land.  I took this time to eat lunch (without having to share!!!) and take a shower that lasted longer than 5 minutes (and OH MY GOD SHAVE MY LEGS). I got out of the shower feeling clean and smooth only to hear somebody frantically pounding on my door. This is a full-fist house-shaking pound and my thoughts were "OH MY GOD THE NEIGHBORHOOD IS ON FIRE" and "PANTS, I NEED PANTS!!" Of course the dogs and babies started their chorus of barking/crying while I struggled to thrown on a pair of dirty yoga pants and simultaneously run to the door. I got there just in time to see a man closing my gate and to find a flyer stuck into my door inviting me to come to his brand new strip mall "church." JESUS CHRIST!!! Either the dude couldn't read or doesn't know the 11th commandment "THOU SHALT NOT RUIN MAGIC TANDEM NAP TIME." Needless to say I was furious and I spent the next 2 hours trying to get the kids back to sleep while writing a strongly worded email in my head to the church, which of course I never got around to sending because really who has time for that?

Anyway, that has provoked me to put up a THIRD sign:

If this one doesn't work, I'm getting a shotgun.