Chatty Little Einstein

So, I don’t know if this is a girl thing, or a toddler thing, or just something with my kids, but my girls are talkers. They can ramble on incessantly about absolutely nothing for hours. They also ask endless questions, then repeat your answer, then repeat the question, then repeat the answer. They were both early talkers, one said “cat” at nine months, the other said “ball” at about the same age, and they’ve been jabbering away at me ever since. I am a quiet person. It’s almost always the first word people use to describe me (tied with its other rival: short). So the fact that I have not one, but two, ceaseless talkers (and off-the-charts tall ones at that), just confounds me. I have no training for dealing with people who never let a moment of silence build.

The hardest thing about getting out the door after tucking each of them into bed is getting them to stop talking long enough to say goodnight. My 4-year-old is notorious for stopping me, just as I’m closing her door, to say things like: “But Mommy, how come the clouds move fast, but the moon moves so slow?” or “How many bones are in our fingers?” Last night it was the bones discussion. Fingers, feet, arms, legs, ribs, skull: she wanted to discuss them all. She has no interest in general descriptions, either. She wants scientific names, exact numbers, and if I were capable of producing one of those science-class skeletons hanging on a rod, she’d be one ecstatic little girl. I’d just given her the low down on fingers, joints, muscles, tendons, and veins, and was rushing for the door, when she let out an excited squeal, then shouted “I need an X-ray right now!” When I asked her why, she wiggled around, too wound-up to lie still: “Because I need to see my bones!”

Now, I don’t know if, when you were her age, you were ever prone to lie awake at night, unable to sleep due to some desperate need to know something in ridiculous detail, right now, but I remember being four years old, and I have no memory of that sensation. Of course, I’m assuming this means she’s a genius in training. I like that she’s a genius in training, so I humor her quite a bit on the desperately-information-gathering front. The nonstop talking, however, I could probably live without.