The Quiet Place

If you’ve ever seen the movie The Quiet Place you know the plot involves monsters inhabiting the world that hunt leveraging incredibly acute hearing. Once you’ve uttered a single word above a whisper you’re as good as eaten. The family in the movie has learned to sign and they do a pretty incredible job overall surviving in these trying times.

If you have a family with 4 kids you realize the fiction of The Quiet Place is wonderful and an invasion like this would put an end to our species. While the consequences aren’t as dire, we have a situation with Sarah’s work that requires some monitoring of our decibel levels. We move between a single family home and a triplex where we rent out units on AirBnB and VRBO. Right now we’re in the triplex downstairs so we’re playing our version of the The Quiet Place.

Everyone is losing. The 3-unit house was built in 1910 so the walls are pretty thin. We hear all the stomping around upstairs and the shrieks of 2–4 year olds echo through the halls like a banshee wail. We’ve created a color coded system for sound control. Red is used for nighttime and early morning. You have to whisper and use “whisper feet”. It’s Quiet Place style. Orange is you can giggle, hop around, etc but no yelling. Green is go for it. Do whatever you want. Fight, scream, tantrum, whatever. Fuck it. The system worked pretty well at first but the novelty is wearing off so we’re upping the punishments to longer time outs and loss of movie night. I hope for our sake and the sake of the people staying upstairs it works. I’d hate to have to start eating the kids to make sure we can make our mortgage.