"Mom, get off the phone!"

Do everyone's children get wild each time they try to have a telephone conversation???

I really am a "talker", but not so much on the phone (except my morning phone call to my best friend J and my calls to my Mom and my sis----)....but I try to get off the phone when I get home, because it really isn't worth it. However, I am a nurse practitioner. That means I am on call every few weeks. I have to call patients and assess them and ask them questions to help them through whatever medical emergency they are having, which is usually constipation, but occasionally quite serious....and always serious enough to them that they need to call me at 8am Sunday morning to talk about it.
Anyway, my children can be playing quietly...and if I pick up the phone, they go absolutely CRAZY!!!! They need a drink, they need a snack, they need a band-aid, they need to go outside, they are wet, they are dirty, they need to go poo-poo, they need to be held, they need a kiss, they need a hug....this is when they choose to hit, and yell, and break things and color on things and push and shove and pour their toys out of the bins, and what they really need is a TIME-OUT....but they KNOW that I have a very difficult time enforcing any rules when I am knee deep in a conversation about what a person has been using to loosen their bowels all week.

It seems to me, that the only way you can truly have a handle on so many kids is if you are 100% on task with mothering while at home....you really can't get distracted because they will walk all over you. It makes me feel like I have lost control and that all the good discipline I did all day is shot out the window with these minutes of no control.

Do any other parents have this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions for how to handle it?