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Kenny is a kid who likes to know what’s going on.   All the time.   I can’t even so much as mutter absent-mindedly to myself without him saying, “What’d you say, Mama?”   Then I’ll repeat it and it will invariably lead to another 20 questions, all because I said something mundane under my breath like, “Guess that laundry will have to wait.”

It’s worse when Casey and I are both in the car driving somewhere with the kids in the back.   Forget trying to hold any semblance of conversation.   Especially if we need to actually talk about something significant.   Every sentence we utter is pinged back with, “What’d you say, Dadda?   What’d you say, Mama?”   It’s maddening.   Ok, on one level it’s cute that he’s so interested in his surroundings and the goings on of family and household, but on another it makes me want to pull my hair out, because I can’t even have a basic conversation with my husband without either having to repeat every word for Kenny, or filter it with something different, if it’s a sensitive topic.

I don’t want to shut him out, or make him feel like he’s not a valid and important member of the family, but at times shouldn’t I have licence for a chat without having to share it all with the four-year-old in the back seat?  

He hears everything, too, that’s the crazy thing.   I’ll be talking to a friend on the phone and say something like, “Oops, I have to go!   I need to get dinner on the table!” and Kenny will look at me when I hang up and say, “You said that we weren’t eating until Daddy got home.   Why did you say you were putting dinner on the table?”   Or the other day in a store, we had run in so that I could return a sweater.   I looked for another and the saleslady helping me found one, just as Cooper started to dismember a manekin.   I said, “I need to get these little guys out of here.   I’ll come back for the sweater another day!”   and as we left, Kenny said, “When are we going back to get the sweater?”   “I don’t know,” I answered, and wouldn’t you know it, every day for the next four days he reminded me that I’d told the lady I was coming back for the sweater, and we needed to go get it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in 1984.