Angels in the Outfield, Devils at Home: I’ll take some private mayhem if it means good behavior in public.

We had quite the day on New Year’s Eve. We woke to a snowstorm, which we drove through, slipping and sliding, for an hour to reach a lawyer’s office in a town that’s normally a 20-minute drive away. We were closing on a refinance of our home mortgage, a process that had taken many frustrating months and literally reams of paper (you’d think much of this could be done digitally, but alas, no). We’d gotten several extensions of our locked-in rate, the last of which expired on that day, so there was no option left: We had to drag the boys (no available babysitters) to a boring law office on a snowy day.

This stapler? About the most exciting thing in a law office, from the boys' perspective.

And there we sat, in a conference room, waiting for the closer to gather her stack of papers and Wite-Out and stapler (seriously, folks; digitize. Let’s go paperless!) and get the process started. While we were waiting, and out of the clear blue, Daniel began complaining of an earache.

Meltdown city? In fact, no.

My husband, in a break during the loooong process of signing multiple copies of loan documents, ran across the street to a convenience store for some children’s Tylenol, which helped Daniel temporarily, but even without the pain, both boys had to hang around a dull office (complete with fake ficus tree) for two hours without complaint and without bugging us endlessly so we could concentrate on signing our names over and over and trying to listen to the details of our particular refi process.

And they did it. They both had activity books and a box of crayons, markers, and colored pencils to entertain themselves, which turned out to be an inspired choice of distraction, since they could pretend they were doing “work” while we did our “work.”

When, finally, the last paper was signed and the last fax received (honestly? Faxes? In almost the second decade of the twenty-first century? I digress, but I was amazed at how many trees had to perish so we could secure a lower mortgage rate. Maybe that explains the fake ficus), the woman who handled the closing pronounced our boys “excellent.” She said: “We end up having a lot of children in here for closings, and I have two children, so I know what I’m talking about. Some of the kids are awful, but you’re excellent.” The firm’s partner, wandering by in his snowboots and fleece, invited the boys to his office to plunder a bowl of candy on his desk, and jokingly offered Daniel an internship (he likes calculators, my little geeky second-grader).

I get this a lot:

“Oh, what angels your boys are!”

“What well-behaved children, my goodness!”

“Is he always this polite?”

“Denise, do your boys ever scream and run around like lunatics?” (this last was a comment from my cousin’s husband, Mike, as he tried to corral his kids and a couple other random female cousins at the tail end of a party, while my boys placidly waited for their coats.)

The answer, to Mike and everyone else: Yes, they do scream and run around. No, they aren’t always this polite. Yes, they are well-behaved and angels. Outside the house.

At home? Eh, not so much.

At home, Daniel and James run, literally run, from one end of the house to the other; leap onto and over furniture (Daniel can’t get across a room without making my heart stop in 12 different ways); slam monster trucks against the base moldings (that would be James, who wants to drive monster trucks for a living someday, after which he might be a dentist); and squabble with each other. Constantly.

Normal boys, right? Of course they are.

But outside the house, you’ll see Daniel slinging a protective arm around his little brother, introducing him to strangers, and stepping out of the way to let other kids run rampant at the library or the post office or the supermarket. James is more rambunctious and mischeivous when we’re out in public, but without Daniel as his foil, he calms down pretty quick. Give him a slice of American cheese at the supermarket and he’s my puppet.

So my secret is out: Those well-behaved boys trailing me in the mall like cute little ducklings? Just imagine the bigger one stomping angrily around the house and making his most determined “mad face” because I’ve asked him to shut the TV/go brush his teeth/stop banging on the piano. Just picture the little one telling me to “stop talking to me! don’t even look at me!” at the dinner table because I committed the grave offense of requesting that he eat one bite of hamburger.

I guess that they feel safe and comfortable enough at home to, as my mom would say, let it all hang out. But the fact that I get the glowing reports on my angels in the outfield? Yeah, that feels good. Because that’s always been one of my goals: I want to be the parent who leaves the doctor’s office (or, in the case of last week’s refi episode, the lawyer’s office), or the family party, or the playdate, and be able to hear, as the door closes behind us, “what nice boys. We’d love to have them come back again.”