Words Overheard

The kids and I are staying home from church this morning because we are all coming down with colds. We had a rough night. Jack and Baylor were up, in all seriousness, seven or eight times. It's hard to be so little, unable to breathe, and forgetful of the fact that your new big boy beds don't have railings that corral you and prevent you from launching yourself off the sides during your nighttime twists and turns.

Evidently our kids are violent at night. Once last night Jack threw himself off the bed with enough force that it woke us up, a floor below him, without the aid of the monitor being necessary.

So we're chilling, playing, and trying to learn how to talk. Rather, I'm working my hardest to get my kids to parrot what I say. What's that? My kids aren't speaking fluent, articulate sentences yet? They still use sign language, whine, and get frustrated when their parents don't correctly translate their various grunts?

Why, yes. That is the truth. (hangs her head in shame)

You have to understand that this is sort of hard for me to accept. Not to sound self-absorbed, but Stephen and I are articulate, both verbally and in the written word, and I tend to be very, ahem, verbose. (That's a nice way of saying SHE JUST WON'T SHUT UP, PLEASE MAKE HER STOP.) My mother likes to say that I came out of the womb talking, so naturally I assumed my firstborn sons, who are in other ways very communicative and interactive, would take to speaking as easily and naturally as their parents did.

(You should know that Stephen and I are both firstborn children, and in many ways we fit our firstborn roles quite perfectly. In other words, we like things in their places, and we each spoke for our younger sisters for a long time, resulting in younger sisters who didn't need to speak for themselves for quite awhile. Bossy much, eh?)

It's kind of a hit to my pride that my sons are still not very articulate whatsoever. I am, of course, ignoring the fact that they communicate quite nicely with each other in their own "twinspeak" language, a phenomenon that often manifests itself with multiples. I've read, in many places, that moms will often feel left out for a very long time because their twins have this own language that no one else can understand. It sort of reminds us of Klingon, as it involves many continuous consonant sounds. (Think "gggklttkz" and you're getting there.)

Well, I can relate to those other mothers. I feel left out, and I want them to either magically start speaking English or provide me with a Jack-and-Baylorspeak translation guide.

I don't like being in the dark.

So it is with great pride that I would like to announce that today Baylor, who was sitting on my lap, looked at the book I was reading and then leaned in, pointed at an "O" in the title, and very clearly and slowly said, "Oh."

I about peed my pants.

To make sure this wasn't a fluke, I asked him to point out any other "O"s on the page. He successfully located two others, saying "oh" each time. Jack joined in, echoing his brothers' discovery, which encouraged me to go find the set of Sesame Street-themed alphabet flash cards I found in the Target dollar bins a few months back. We concentrated on "ABC," and Jack was able to say both "A" and "B" without any problems, and both were able to locate the letters in various places with intermittent luck.

After a few minutes of concentrated study, the boys got distracted by the Justin Timberlake song playing on the iPod (Jack just can't stop the rhythm), so I let them just play with all the cards on the table. Imagine my delight and surprise when Jack found a picture of Elmo dressed in full catcher's gear and proclaimed, "El-mo!"

This mother's heart was bursting with pride.

I should note here that, at random times, both boys can say "puppy," "baby," "oval," "ball" (this is a popular one), "daddy," "mama," "no," and "uh-oh." In fact, now that I think about, just this morning Baylor walked up to me, pointed to my leg, and said, "Mama."

Perhaps there is hope. Maybe my sons will grow to be great orators after all.

Or maybe they'll impersonate Klingons at Star Trek conventions. We can only hope.