The Voices in My Head

My oldest son has always been a man of few words. I worked with him on his conversational skills all last school year and felt that I had made substantive progress by the end of the year when I got him to say, "I don't feel like talking to you right now, Mommy" in response to my questions about school, instead of ignoring me and staring out the car window.

By the time summer rolled around and he still had nothing to say to me (or anyone else for that matter), I took him for a complete speech and hearing evaluation just to make sure everything was OK. Ears checked out fine, but the two-hour speech evaluation was a nail-biter. Cade hung in there with the flashcards, but didn't seem to want to answer any questions, like when the speech therapist asked him where in his house he plays. When she asked him for the ten thousandth time where he plays (I'm actually not even sure what response she wanted here), he barked at her in an exasperated voice - "Right here, lady!". She immediately ended the session, gave him a clean bill of speech health, told us that his primary problem was that he didn't WANT to talk to us, and gave us a nifty worksheet on tips for stimulating speech with preschoolers.

Fast forward a year. His little brother, who was extremely early verbal and a nonstop talker, has started to rub off on him. Basically this means that between the two of them, they never shut up. Despite my profound hearing loss and the fact that I sometimes ditch my hearing aids for a good portion of the day, my ears are actually tired at the end of the day - is that possible?

Here's just a sampling of the things I listen to all day and the categories of comments under which they fall:

Great Ideas
Cade: Lookit Drew - Matchbox cars go faster if we put water on the floor!
Drew: Cade! Watch me jump from train table to coffee table!
Cade: The scooter goes down the hill faster if you do it backwards.
Drew: Let's do sidewalk chalk on the side of the van!


Fights
Drew (sobbing!): Cade take my cars!
Cade: They're MY cars! (even though he never card one whit about cars until Drew took an interest in them)

Cade (while playing Candyland): You can't be green! I'm green!

Drew: Don't color on my page. That's MY page!

Tattletailing
Drew: Mommy! Cade tell on me!

Whining
Cade: But Mommy! I'm hungry! PLEASE let me have Cheez Nips for breakfast! I really, really want them!
Drew: But I want the Cars vitamins, not Flintstones!
Cade: Mommy! You know I don't wear shirts with buttons!

Attention Getting
Either Boy: Hey Mommy? (repeated a thousand times a day by each child and followed by either a question or a comment).

And my two favorite verbal development categories that have recently emerged:

Police
Drew: Mommy! Don't say "Eat your freaking vegetables"! Freaking vegetables is a bad word!
Cade: Mommy! You're supposed to slow down at yellow lights - it means a red light is coming!
Cade: Mommy! There's a drought! You're not supposed to leave the water on while you brush your teeth!

Court Reporter
Cade: But Mommy! Earlier you said we could paint when we got home from the park!
Drew: Mommy! You said we could watch a show when we got up from nap.
Cade: But Mommy! You said we could have a snack if we ate lunch. I ate all the fruit!

But on the bright side, at least Cade is talking now and saving me money on speech therapy.