For Christmas, Chase asked for some X-Box headphones.

For those of you who aren’t fortunate enough to have teenage boys, they use these headphones to talk to other kids around the globe, while they play all the video games that you don’t let the other PTA moms know your kids reallyplay when no one else is looking. (Except in my case, my husband is better at the games the my kids, so I have no hope of trying to convince any of them that a HALO on your head coming from heaven is much better than eight intereupted hours of playing a game called HALO. And while the sam hell they named that game HALO is beyond me, because it’s anything but Halo-ish.)

Okay, I’m getting off track.

So, apparently in a moment of utter and complete tiredness on my part, Chase was brilliant enough to request these X-box headphones with the little speaker doo-hickey so you can talk to people.

I’ve gotta give him credit. If he had asked when I was coherent, the answer would have been a resounding NO.

After 15 years though, he knows me, he played his cards right, I caved.

Okay, so, it gets worse.

He’s got a used X-box in his room (okay, go ahead and gasp all you want…the router signal is horrid, trust me, I hear about if often) and ever since Christmas, he’s turned his room into this teenage MAN CAVE that he only ventures from to eat, pee, and go to school. And that last one is only when forced. Notice that I didn’t mention bathe?

I heard a choking sound the other day and I was sure the house keeper had flat passed out from the smell.

I heard it again tonight, this time I got up to look, it was my husband wretching. He thought something had died in that room. We’re still not sure.

Even Jordan said, “Okay, that room REEKS.”

You know it’s bad when a TWELVE YEAR OLD says that a room smells bad, because really, until the smell is just totally OFF THE CHART, I didn’t even think it registered on a twelve year old boy’s nose?

Yes, so my caveman of a child is holed up in that room, with those ridiculous headphones on.

We can hear him downstairs as he talks to his friends playing the game at the same time, “WHOA DUDE! LOOK OUT! HEY, NOT THAT WAY!”

The problem is, HE CANNOT HEAR US.

I don’t know who made these things, some stupid engineer who retired from Bose and figured he could torture all the moms of teenage boys, because basically these things are like super sound proof.

The National Freaking Guard could be outside with the Rose Bowl Marching Band, and all we would hear is “WHOA, DUDE!”

Robert has tried, effortlessly, to call Chase down for dinner.

It’s kind of turned into an ongoing joke.

“Chase.”

“CHase.”

“CHASE.”

By the fourth try, he has his hand cupped (as if that matters?)

“CHHHAAASSSEE.”

“WHOA, DUDE.”

I mean he hears NOTHING.

This has got to the the all time dumbest thing we’ve ever purchased and for all you who are wondering WHY he’s playing video games on a school night, well, it’s after homework and chores are done. The grades are there. Whatever. Pick your battles. You’ll find that out later if you’ve got kids.

So, I finally figured out the trick to getting him out of the room, without so much as a whisper.

Just walk ten steps to the router.

Flip. Unplug that sucker and wait.

In about, oh, 10 seconds, like clockwork, you hear THUMP THUMP THUMP from the boards in his room, creaking.

He will come, just like magic, to the balcony and ask whomever is closest, “Hey. What happened?”

So now, instead of calling him for anything, we just flip off that router.

And in the meantime, I’ve written a letter to the jackass developer of those headphones, and requested that he now develop a smaller version, preferrably pink and easily hidden behind earrings, so that moms can have the same luxury of being able to drown out those boys.

I can just envision it now:

“Mom, what’s for dinner?”

“WHOA, BRENDA, DUDE. DID YOU SEE OPRAH TODAY?”

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