I am a quiet person. I have, in the past, gone whole days without hearing the sound of my own voice. When Cheeks was born I struggled to keep up the running commentary that all the experts recommend for new babies. I tried all the same, and a few months later I found that I no longer needed to keep the words flowing, he started adding enough of his own.
Cheeks is a talker. He has coo-ed, ooo-ed, ahhh-ed, and lalala-ed since he was born. My favorite was the “bagel bagel bagel” phase. Now our days are a stream of stories, songs, rhyming nonsense, whining, pestering, requesting, refusing, laughing, crying, random noise making, and repeating. I need to say approximately 3 words in any given day, “no” and “quiet please”, everything else can be communicated with hand gestures and facial expressions. And we’re getting to the point where even “quiet please” can be conveyed with a single finger over my lips. I speak so little during the day that I sometimes wonder how it is that he’s learning to talk at all.
But talk he does. “Mama?” escapes his lips each morning before he has even opened his eyes. He often talks with his mouth full of food, dribbling down his chin as he utters something I can’t understand through the sandwich in his mouth. Even when I can’t hear him, he’s talking. I once walked into his room, searching out the sudden and suspicious silence, only to find that he was just whispering. Nap time, that blissful break in the day, is a thing of the past. If I put him down at all, he spends his 30-60 minutes of “resting time” yelling at me from his room or telling himself a story.
Last week Cheeks and I went for a hike. It was short, since he weighs 30lbs and kicks his feet when he’s in the backpack, and for almost all of the two miles he talked constantly. Directly in my ear. By mile 1 3/4 I was threatening to leave him right there on the trail if he didn’t shut his trap. And it worked! He was awesomely, wonderfully, miraculously silent for three whole minutes. I heard my feet on the trail, my breath, a squirrel in the leaves. And just as I had finished marveling at what silence is like, and began to actually form a thought, we rounded a corner and he spotted “our car!” and “a car that looks like Blaine’s car!” and “a puddle!” And the monologue began again. “I can’t walk in the puddle today. Oooh, there’s some mud! Are we going home now? Are we going to go in the car? That car looks like Blaine’s, but Blaine is at home. Can I drive the car? Will Daddy be home? We can play the xylophone. Patty is sleeping, I think.”
Uh-huh. Is that right? Hmmmm…