Shhh! Don't Tell Daddy...

That's one of the biggest agreements I've busted wide open: TV time. It's easy for Scott—who gets to leave the house and go out to fancy business luncheons where people don't spit or hurl food—to tell me that the kids shouldn't watch "a lot" of TV. He doesn't have to try to go to the bathroom or shower in nanoseconds, all the while keeping an ear out to hear if the twins knock over something heavy or bash each other unconscious. While I don't sit them in front of the TV for hours at a time, there are moments when I absolutely need to get something done and they're being impossible. But with the magic words, "Who wants to watch Blue's Clues?" I suddenly get a half-hour to finish what I'm doing.

Then there's the ketchup thing. Scott maintains this bizarre belief that if I let the kids eat food with ketchup on it, that they'll never eat anything but ketchup. He likens it to a juvenile narcotic and insists I'm enabling an inevitable addition. (He has nightmares of us having to bring ketchup with us wherever we go and having to give Abbey a bowl of it for lunch, to the shock and dismay of the onlookers.) Whenever I take the ketchup bottle out of the refrigerator at dinnertime, he demands that I put it back. "They don't need that," he says, desperately trying to keep the drug away from his children. But when he's not around and the kids aren't eating, that ketchup bottle, boy does it do the trick.

Now I'm not alone in conducting this secret life with my kids. I know plenty of other stay-at-home moms who let their kids do things that the fathers would go nuts over if they knew. There's one mother who would give her kid Oreo cookies on the sly. But the kid ratted her out one day when he told his father that he wanted "the blue cookies in there" pointing to the telltale blue bag in the cupboard. Another mom—who hasn't been found out yet—lets her kid have chocolate chips when chocolate is expressly verboten in the father's point of view. Yet another mother lets her kid run around her husband's office and bang on the computer keyboard. An explicit no-no in that house. But, as she argues, sometimes you just get sick of saying no all day.

What I need is for the kids to understand what I mean when I say, "Shhh! Don't tell Daddy," and then learn not to rat me out.