Verbose observations coupled with effusive bursts of prolixity. My children speak, babble and rhetorically ruminate over everything they see. They find traffic lights absurd, an approaching thunder cloud unique, and a milk truck making deliveries both wonderful and pedestrian, depending on what moment of the day it is
Though they are young, my loquacious children already view the world in an abstract and questioning way. Unless they are sleeping, my offspring make it part of their daily routine to verbally bludgeon me with a foray of nonsensical words and random thoughts that flow interminably, like a dripping faucet connected to an bountiful reservoir of consonents and vowels.
These mono-syllabic dissertations are sometimes little more than grunts and caveman utterances as they inhale the environment around them. Like an Indy race car exploding from the pits, every little thought instantaneously transforms into a speeding neuron, thrust along a synaptic thoroughfare to the vocal chords. With a gust of breath and some help from the tongue and lips, sounds become words; words become expressions that illuminate the questions that fill a child’s mind.
Whether we like it or not, parents are transformed into tutorial sounding boards, shanghaied into navigating questioning minds through the piranha infested swamp called “growing up”.
As you parents undoubtedly know, somewhere along the way, the melodic banter of language gets side tracked. It’s a fiery wreck in turn four where the soothing sounds of childhood become a crash course in auditory frustration. Somewhere along the developmental super highway of language, sounds evolve into a barrage of meaningless words, primal yelling and competition for linguistic domination, hour after painful hour. It is enough to wear down the average parent.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop. Like and invisible wetness, oozing, ever so slowly down the side of your raw, irritated forehead, you feel the anxiety building. Like Chinese water torture pounding relentlessly at your scalp, eventually, a child’s little words, their benign questions, begin to feel like shrill arrows piercing and pricking your over loaded sensory system.
I like to call it high volume interrupting. An unadulterated verbal warfare carried out by tiny commandos with chocolate stains on their lips.
I experienced a major case of interruptions recently on a family drive across town. It’s sixty-degrees. Indian Summer is in full bloom. The sun is shining and blue skies fill the spectrum of existence. The windows are down. The wind is crisp, and cool, cascading throughout the car like a renegade wave splashing across a coral reef. The stereo is on; a classic Stones tune sets the rhythm of the drive. The over-sized off road tires whine noisily against the asphalt creating a four-wheel-drive concerto.
Like a donut overflowing with grape jam, the cockpit of our jeep is filled with a saturation of sounds. Like adding raw sugar to a bowl of all ready sickeningly sweet, double chocolate chip ice cream, the sounds become hard to ingest. Bass, and beat and hum and screams and random sentences jumbled into a frenzied array of juvenile jargon. Like a blocked nasal passage, it has become an uncomfortable congestion that medicine will not cure.
The children are in the back seat. Kenzie is singing songs with no beginning or end. Twinkle twinkle little star becomes a mallet pounding our skulls as she sings it over and over and over again. The song has no beginning and no end. Just twinkling stars and wondering where they are and up above the sky so bright. Diamonds in the sky and off key ramblings of incoherent, nonsensical merry making. Kenzie doesn’t just sing. Oh no, that would be too easy for my tiny tot. Instead; Kenzie orates in a musical expose of jet engine sound and window shattering vocalizations.
Meanwhile; Zander is talking in tongues. My five-year-old son has turned into a back seat heathen, drunk with the nectar of salvation. Like a proselytizing preacher profiteering from the pulpit, Zander stares out his window, vociferously persuading an invisible army of sycophants to join his cause.
Both children are rambling loudly, in a boisterous, unappealing way. It’s as if they are in some sort of demonic contest to observe and then report on everything. Though there are certainly no rules, I can only ascertain that whomever is the loudest is the winner.
Two little mouths roaring incessantly about leaves in the trees and biodegradable garbage and the concrete that is cracked, and the winter that is coming and the clouds that form our atmosphere and there is more oxygen on the ground than there is on the tops of mountains, but if you are at the top of a mountain, then your brain swells and you die from not enough fluids and, you’d be cold so you would want to wear your mittens and a scarf would keep your chin warm and you wouldn’t want to brush your teeth on the mountain top because the toothpaste would freeze and then you’d have a big frozen white toothpaste mouth and your lips would be cold, unless of course you pulled your scarf up over your mouth or maybe swallowed some warm water from the fire you would make on the side of the hill.
The backseat has become a hostile terrorist camp run by little people who use run on sentences and loud speech as bullets.
Kenzie sings. Zander philosophizes. The words clutter the back of the Jeep choking off light. Like sabers rattling in an auditory duel for world domination, their pre-school discussion takes on fierce and angry over tones. Like verbose politicians swaggering before an empty chamber in a filibuster of evil intent, my two little children combat one another, snapping and snipping like two Doberman’s fighting for the last piece of steak. They yell and ridicule and scream and scowl as their high pitched cacophony of psycho-babble drills into the back of our heads like a jackhammer mulching through warm cheese.
“Daddy, I was speaking first”
“Nooooo, he wasn’t! “
“She’s interrupting me.”
“Daddy I can sing my song if I want to?”
“I can’t hear my self talk daddy!”
“Tell her to stop talking over me dad!”
It was a brutal brother-sister battle. A contest of Herculean proportions.
“Daddy!,” Kenzie shouts. It’s no use. Zander’s persistent droning makes hearing her almost impossible.
“And the volcanoes have lava and …”
“Daddy,” Kenzie again shouts.
Sensing her anger, Zander speaks louder. “And the lava goes into the ocean and steam happens…”
“He no stop talking, daddy…”
Zander turns and waves an angry fist at his sister.
“Daddy, he’s interrupting me again, I was talking first.”
Zander smiles insouciantly and continues his barrage of thoughts. “And then the leaves fall off the trees and …”
“Daddy I was talking first,” Kenzie shouts. “I no like him. He always interrupts.”
“I do not,” Zander fires back. “She interrupts me.”
“I do not!”
“You do to!”
Like a band of gypsies banging kitchen pots in the back seat, the bickering begins to physically hurt. I wince and look at Dana. She is squinting through her sunglasses as if some invisible force is performing a lobotomy through her eye socket. Her face displays anguish, the kind of look a failing calculus student wears upon learning there’s a pop quiz on a chapter in the book he forgot to buy.
“Daddy, I want to tell you something,” Kenzie shouts.
“No, Kenzie, I was talking first,” Zander angrily interjects, of course interrupting his sister again. At this point it is hard to know, whose turn it is too talk. The children have disappeared from the back seat. As I look in the rear view mirror, all I can see is two large festering vocal cords that continue to hemorrhage anger and words and loudness. Like being trapped in a bathroom stall with Metallica, the inside of my head is turning to syrup. I can feel my brain melting into a warm gelatinous goo the consistency of warm chocolate pudding. Images are beginning to blur as my equilibrium becomes a passenger on the sinking Titanic.
Suddenly, the overwhelming need for silence consumes Dana and me. I feel like no one should be able to talk and we should all pray to Jesus for spiritual equanimity and perhaps a solution for world hunger. Unfortunately, this thought comes out of my lips as…
“Don’t make me come back there, you two. Don’t make me stop this car, because damn it, I will turn this car around and we’ll all go home and live in our rooms for the rest of our lives.”
Suddenly I was everyone’s father. I was the front seat oager, gripping the steering wheel like a psychotic lunatic, hyperventilating with a red face, and making empty threats that children have heard since Mary and Joseph told baby Jesus to calm down in the back of the donkey wagon.
My angry breath was fogging up the rear view mirror as I pushed my bulging, swollen eyes toward the glass. Staring back at me were two bewildered faces, shrinking into their car seats.
They stared at me. I stared at them. The Rolling Stones, the wind, the whine of the road, it was the climax of a Clint Eastwood Western, without all the bloodshed.
Suddenly, the car burst out into a chorus of laughter. Kids will be kids, I thought to myself. They’ll ask silly questions, and when cooped up in the back seat like ground beef in a box, they’re bound to fight and to holler and to get on their parents nerves once in a while. It may not always be pleasant, but this is how little people become informed adults. It’s the way of the world.
Suddenly my pressure headache was gone, my anger attenuated and my desire refueled to be the tour guide of their lives.
“OK, who can tell me what Volcanoes do?” I yelled loudly.
The kids started shouting out answers gleefully as we zoomed off to lunch.
Remember: when it comes to kids; it’s only noise if you aren’t listening!
Though they are young, my loquacious children already view the world in an abstract and questioning way. Unless they are sleeping, my offspring make it part of their daily routine to verbally bludgeon me with a foray of nonsensical words and random thoughts that flow interminably, like a dripping faucet connected to an bountiful reservoir of consonents and vowels.
These mono-syllabic dissertations are sometimes little more than grunts and caveman utterances as they inhale the environment around them. Like an Indy race car exploding from the pits, every little thought instantaneously transforms into a speeding neuron, thrust along a synaptic thoroughfare to the vocal chords. With a gust of breath and some help from the tongue and lips, sounds become words; words become expressions that illuminate the questions that fill a child’s mind.
Whether we like it or not, parents are transformed into tutorial sounding boards, shanghaied into navigating questioning minds through the piranha infested swamp called “growing up”.
As you parents undoubtedly know, somewhere along the way, the melodic banter of language gets side tracked. It’s a fiery wreck in turn four where the soothing sounds of childhood become a crash course in auditory frustration. Somewhere along the developmental super highway of language, sounds evolve into a barrage of meaningless words, primal yelling and competition for linguistic domination, hour after painful hour. It is enough to wear down the average parent.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop. Like and invisible wetness, oozing, ever so slowly down the side of your raw, irritated forehead, you feel the anxiety building. Like Chinese water torture pounding relentlessly at your scalp, eventually, a child’s little words, their benign questions, begin to feel like shrill arrows piercing and pricking your over loaded sensory system.
I like to call it high volume interrupting. An unadulterated verbal warfare carried out by tiny commandos with chocolate stains on their lips.
I experienced a major case of interruptions recently on a family drive across town. It’s sixty-degrees. Indian Summer is in full bloom. The sun is shining and blue skies fill the spectrum of existence. The windows are down. The wind is crisp, and cool, cascading throughout the car like a renegade wave splashing across a coral reef. The stereo is on; a classic Stones tune sets the rhythm of the drive. The over-sized off road tires whine noisily against the asphalt creating a four-wheel-drive concerto.
Like a donut overflowing with grape jam, the cockpit of our jeep is filled with a saturation of sounds. Like adding raw sugar to a bowl of all ready sickeningly sweet, double chocolate chip ice cream, the sounds become hard to ingest. Bass, and beat and hum and screams and random sentences jumbled into a frenzied array of juvenile jargon. Like a blocked nasal passage, it has become an uncomfortable congestion that medicine will not cure.
The children are in the back seat. Kenzie is singing songs with no beginning or end. Twinkle twinkle little star becomes a mallet pounding our skulls as she sings it over and over and over again. The song has no beginning and no end. Just twinkling stars and wondering where they are and up above the sky so bright. Diamonds in the sky and off key ramblings of incoherent, nonsensical merry making. Kenzie doesn’t just sing. Oh no, that would be too easy for my tiny tot. Instead; Kenzie orates in a musical expose of jet engine sound and window shattering vocalizations.
Meanwhile; Zander is talking in tongues. My five-year-old son has turned into a back seat heathen, drunk with the nectar of salvation. Like a proselytizing preacher profiteering from the pulpit, Zander stares out his window, vociferously persuading an invisible army of sycophants to join his cause.
Both children are rambling loudly, in a boisterous, unappealing way. It’s as if they are in some sort of demonic contest to observe and then report on everything. Though there are certainly no rules, I can only ascertain that whomever is the loudest is the winner.
Two little mouths roaring incessantly about leaves in the trees and biodegradable garbage and the concrete that is cracked, and the winter that is coming and the clouds that form our atmosphere and there is more oxygen on the ground than there is on the tops of mountains, but if you are at the top of a mountain, then your brain swells and you die from not enough fluids and, you’d be cold so you would want to wear your mittens and a scarf would keep your chin warm and you wouldn’t want to brush your teeth on the mountain top because the toothpaste would freeze and then you’d have a big frozen white toothpaste mouth and your lips would be cold, unless of course you pulled your scarf up over your mouth or maybe swallowed some warm water from the fire you would make on the side of the hill.
The backseat has become a hostile terrorist camp run by little people who use run on sentences and loud speech as bullets.
Kenzie sings. Zander philosophizes. The words clutter the back of the Jeep choking off light. Like sabers rattling in an auditory duel for world domination, their pre-school discussion takes on fierce and angry over tones. Like verbose politicians swaggering before an empty chamber in a filibuster of evil intent, my two little children combat one another, snapping and snipping like two Doberman’s fighting for the last piece of steak. They yell and ridicule and scream and scowl as their high pitched cacophony of psycho-babble drills into the back of our heads like a jackhammer mulching through warm cheese.
“Daddy, I was speaking first”
“Nooooo, he wasn’t! “
“She’s interrupting me.”
“Daddy I can sing my song if I want to?”
“I can’t hear my self talk daddy!”
“Tell her to stop talking over me dad!”
It was a brutal brother-sister battle. A contest of Herculean proportions.
“Daddy!,” Kenzie shouts. It’s no use. Zander’s persistent droning makes hearing her almost impossible.
“And the volcanoes have lava and …”
“Daddy,” Kenzie again shouts.
Sensing her anger, Zander speaks louder. “And the lava goes into the ocean and steam happens…”
“He no stop talking, daddy…”
Zander turns and waves an angry fist at his sister.
“Daddy, he’s interrupting me again, I was talking first.”
Zander smiles insouciantly and continues his barrage of thoughts. “And then the leaves fall off the trees and …”
“Daddy I was talking first,” Kenzie shouts. “I no like him. He always interrupts.”
“I do not,” Zander fires back. “She interrupts me.”
“I do not!”
“You do to!”
Like a band of gypsies banging kitchen pots in the back seat, the bickering begins to physically hurt. I wince and look at Dana. She is squinting through her sunglasses as if some invisible force is performing a lobotomy through her eye socket. Her face displays anguish, the kind of look a failing calculus student wears upon learning there’s a pop quiz on a chapter in the book he forgot to buy.
“Daddy, I want to tell you something,” Kenzie shouts.
“No, Kenzie, I was talking first,” Zander angrily interjects, of course interrupting his sister again. At this point it is hard to know, whose turn it is too talk. The children have disappeared from the back seat. As I look in the rear view mirror, all I can see is two large festering vocal cords that continue to hemorrhage anger and words and loudness. Like being trapped in a bathroom stall with Metallica, the inside of my head is turning to syrup. I can feel my brain melting into a warm gelatinous goo the consistency of warm chocolate pudding. Images are beginning to blur as my equilibrium becomes a passenger on the sinking Titanic.
Suddenly, the overwhelming need for silence consumes Dana and me. I feel like no one should be able to talk and we should all pray to Jesus for spiritual equanimity and perhaps a solution for world hunger. Unfortunately, this thought comes out of my lips as…
“Don’t make me come back there, you two. Don’t make me stop this car, because damn it, I will turn this car around and we’ll all go home and live in our rooms for the rest of our lives.”
Suddenly I was everyone’s father. I was the front seat oager, gripping the steering wheel like a psychotic lunatic, hyperventilating with a red face, and making empty threats that children have heard since Mary and Joseph told baby Jesus to calm down in the back of the donkey wagon.
My angry breath was fogging up the rear view mirror as I pushed my bulging, swollen eyes toward the glass. Staring back at me were two bewildered faces, shrinking into their car seats.
They stared at me. I stared at them. The Rolling Stones, the wind, the whine of the road, it was the climax of a Clint Eastwood Western, without all the bloodshed.
Suddenly, the car burst out into a chorus of laughter. Kids will be kids, I thought to myself. They’ll ask silly questions, and when cooped up in the back seat like ground beef in a box, they’re bound to fight and to holler and to get on their parents nerves once in a while. It may not always be pleasant, but this is how little people become informed adults. It’s the way of the world.
Suddenly my pressure headache was gone, my anger attenuated and my desire refueled to be the tour guide of their lives.
“OK, who can tell me what Volcanoes do?” I yelled loudly.
The kids started shouting out answers gleefully as we zoomed off to lunch.
Remember: when it comes to kids; it’s only noise if you aren’t listening!