out numbered 400,000 to 1

My daughter, Emma, who is only 16 months old, talks in her sleep. How do I know this? She still sleeps with us. Did I say us? I mean me. That is to say that at some point in the night Gene is on some other bed in the house, so that he doesn't wake up his wife and baby. In truth, it's so that HE will get a good night sleep. But that's all another issue.

It came to my attention, while Emma was babbling on in her sleep (and I'm sure SHE knew what she was saying) that I had heard one time a statistic that women speak, like, 400,000 words in a day. Men speak about 1 word a day. Usually it's "Dinner?" Okay, my numbers might be off by a few, but still, I thought: "Poor Gene. Here he is...the only guy in a family with 3 girls. There's going to be a lot of chatter for the next 18 years." And then I thought: "It would do him wise to learn how to better listen." Not that he doesn't try, and not that he doesn't do a good job at times. But, really, what man doesn't have room for improvement in that area?

At the same time, I'm sure, it would do us girls wise to learn how to scale back the wordy-wordage in our conversations. To pick our words carefully and to speak only when truly conveying something important. This is going to be challenging genetically. You see, down the K-nibbens line of my family, for centuries, the women have talked simply to hear themselves talk. No offense mom (it's not YOUR fault -it's genetic). We talk to ourselves in the bathroom mirror. We bore others with the "excruciating minutia" (-Elaine Benes, Seinfeld) of our daily lives. Like this article, for example, I really have no point other than to say "Poor, poor Gene."

Despite the lack of sleep I got last night, I feel my brain is not the mush it has been for the last couple weeks. We've been vacationing and camping and home-canning, and I wanted to share pictures, but that will have to wait. I felt somewhat intelligent this morning when I woke up, and I just wanted to hear myself talk. About the vacation? That will come next time (hopefully with some pictures), and I will try to scale back my words to only 200,000.