Why won't they just shut up?

Good things must be taken in moderation.

I remember when I first started drinking socially. It was in high school, and it was awesome! Drinking was a form of social door-opening, it introduced me to a new group of people my parents warned me about. It also taught me about the joys of tossing inhabitions to the wind.

Then I got all big-headed about it and started thinking of myself as the 17 to 18 year old division drinking champion of the world. And I ended up meeting a toilet in some Corpus Christi hotel room for the evening. Photos exist of this event. I'm not proud.

I had lessons to learn from my behavior. I learned that when drinking tequila, you don't have to drink all the tequila in order to have a good time. A keg of beer is not a "serving size" (college taught me that one -- thanks Texas A&M!). Our bodies have this defense mechanism that kicks our ass once we start pushing the boundaries. It saves us from ourselves.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in ass-kicker for toddler talking.

From the moment our kids were born, we hoped for the day when they'd talk. We analyzed every single coo and goo to decipher if the kid just said "momma" or "daddy" or "transcendentalism". Eventually that day arrived. And it was a special and beautiful thing. So special that I don't exactly recall what their first words were. I'm sure my wife wrote it down. She's good about that.

As time went by, we watched our kiddos learn to communicate. One word turns into two. This turns into phrases. Phrases turn into butchered sentences. These become responsive to questioning. Eventually, marginal subject-verb agreements started occurring. And then the questions started. And the chatter. And the random thoughts of the day. And the questions. Did I mention the questions? And then the interrupting. And the questions! Jesus fucking christ are you kidding me? Are they still fucking talking?

The arc from the sweet flower of learning to talk to please just shut the fuck up already is profoundly short. They go from their first beer of speech to hanging their heads in the toilet in no time flat. Unfortunately for us, there's no physical safeguard against this incessant chatter.

Lilly and Nolan went from calm speech to talking all.the.time over the last few months. All the time. They're always talking. With the one exception of when Dora is on TV. Other than that, if they're conscious, they're yapping. And they're not exactly reciting War and Peace, or providing insight into how to best cook low-fat food that is also delicious and nutritious. Nope. They're busy chattering about their baby jaguars, or their toy cars, or the fact that Diego has a penis, and that's what makes him a boy, or talking about how we can go to Tiki Beach, or blabbering about how they'd really like to watch the Dora episode with the robots except that theres a volcano in that episode and that's scary and we can't watch that, to talking again about Diego's anatomical setup and how that makes him different than Dora.....

I'd really like it if they'd just shut the fuck up for a bit. Just a couple hours. Please. Just shut the fuck up already!

We spent this weekend at my mother's house. My sister, through some cosmic joke, had twin boys in February of this year. She and her husband were spending their first childless time out of town together since their twins were born. Having survived this myself, I was all too happy to help out with the childcare.

But we had to take our kids with us. And they never shut the fuck up!

The car ride from my house to my mother's house is about 10-15 minutes. It's only 15 miles away. We're not talking about the kind of trip we need to pack a lunch for. As soon as we hit the road, Nolan began asking about the "cop car". "Mommy, did you see that cop car?" "Hey Daddy, is that a cop car?" Over and over and over again. Nevermind the fact that there was no fucking cop car anywhere around. Where the boy got this line from is unknown to me. As is his other current favorite, "hey, it's the police!" I don't know where this is coming from, but I'm beginning to wonder about what happens at the house while I'm gone.

OK, so this "cop car" bit started about a sidewalk crack after we got past the end of our alley. It didn't stop. I want you to think of the "cop car" bit as the bass line to this opus of speech. It's the pulse. The opening bars to Gustav Holst's "Mars" if you will.

Of course, the greatness of Holst is that there are a ton of other parts going on over the droning "cop car" bass line. Mixed in with this was Lilly asking a series of random questions. Inquiring about the location of her Witch doll, for example. So now it's "did you see the cop car?" with "hey mommy, where did my witch doll go?" Over and over. Occasionally, we'd get lucky and they'd change it up with "Hey, I dropped my drink" or something similarly charming. Of course, while this is happening, the wife and I are trying to have a conversation about actual events that need to be discussed.

That last part was a big mistake.

We've noticed that we can't actually talk to each other in the car anymore, because the children will get jealous and start talking over us. Jesus, this is aggravating. Think about driving the drunk guy home after a long night. Eventually he'll just randomly string a sentence together just to interrupt the conversation and keep people talking to him? Yeah, my daughter does that. Probably shouldn't have given her that beer.

So in the midst of "did you see that cop car" and "where's my witch" and "Hey, get my drink" we're now met with Lilly's "Ideas". Lilly started doing this about two months ago. She'll say "Hey (mommy/daddy), I have an idea!" We'll respond "what's your idea, honey" and she'll say (literally), "Hmmm, why don't we alldalala and then speckalala, and then Tiki Beach, but we can't go to Tiki Beach because we falffalalala, and plaaa, but then we could sllalalda and then maybe we could aligasha." She couches a series of gibberish as her "idea". Sometimes there will be random words mixed into it to make it interesting. It's just a sham so we'll pay attention to her. Unfortunately, it's also fucking adorable, which is why we tolerated it for so long. It's not adorable anymore.

"Hey, did you see that cop car"
"where's my witch"
"get my drink!"
"what are we doing for dinner tonight?"
"Hey, I have an idea"
"What's you're idea"
"Hmmm, flalafa and beach and allgasholyppiads and Julio Franco was a butcher at second base"

Spin, Rinse, Repeat.

By the time we were about two miles from my mother's house, I realized that our once quiet Honda had become a chattering box of noise. I couldn't talk because my ears were trying to process the sounds of at least three other voices, one of which very well could have been mine. Nothing was making sense. It was just noise! Like the sounds movie actor extras make during large crowd dinner scenes to create an authentic environment. It was at this point that I became my father.

"ENOUGH!" I said. Not quite yelling, not quite not yelling. Enough to get some attention. Suddenly, the car was quiet. "Daddy is going to talk to mommy for a little bit, and you're going to be quiet!" Shit hell if this didn't work! I think I scared them. For the next thirty seconds, I didn't hear anything about a cop car, any witches, ideas, Dora, or Diego's penis. I thought I won. I ignored the fact that I just did the classic dad move of complaining about "those kids" and "all that damn noise". I started feeling a twinge of pride. Then I heard

"Hey Daddy, did you see that cop car?"

and I'm right back to regretting the day they learned to speak.

God, can't they just shut the fuck up?