Just Make It Stop!

Last night, I woke to the sound of a loud, high-pitched beeping every 20 seconds or so. I followed the sound out into the hallway to find the carbon monoxide detector acting up. In my sleepy state, all my efforts to stop the noise only made it worse until it was finally a constant, high-pitched screech. I panicked at this point and just tried to muffle the sound by hugging it close to my body and completely covering it while I shouted for Matt to help me.

I'm not sure how he slept through the original beeping which seemed so loud to me, but by the time the thing was a constant beep and I was shouting for it to just stop, he came to my rescue. He wordlessly took the shrieking thing from me and marched it downstairs. I heard the front door open, then shut, then he came shuffling back into bed.

I asked him how he got it to stop, and he said, "I didn't. I just chucked it out the front door." He was asleep moments later.

Well, as I sit here in my living room today with the windows open, I can hear a faint beeping coming from the yard somewhere. I suppose we want our yard to be as free from harmful carbon monoxide as our house though, right?

What Language Am I Speaking?

Matt and I are both thrilled to be discovering that our biggest two boys can definitely sing - on tune, that is!  They have a talent for quickly learning a tune and also learn the lyrics to just about any song almost immediately, it seems.  It is so fun to hear them not only singing along to songs they love, but also singing them on tune without any backup music!

Well, this morning, after singing one of their favorite songs about a hundred times in a row, they began to get bored with the same old lyrics and decided to write their own.  Let me describe it a bit better than that:  they each came up with their own lyrics and both sang these lyrics at the same time, each getting louder and louder, competing with each other, trying to out-do the other.  It got a bit... well, loud, to say the least.  

We adults tried to not to let this drive us crazy, reminding ourselves that we were happy they love to sing and focused on the humor of their made-up lyrics, rather than go insane by the competitive loudness of the situation.  Remember, they were both singing the exact same tune, and Ben's lyrics were real words with a bit of a story to go with it.  They at least made a bit of sense.  Mitchell's were a bit more nonsensical.  He was just speaking his own language and coming up with some pretty silly-sounding lyrics.  

When things began to wind down, as they inevitably do, even without parental intervention, Mitchell stopped his song and turned to me and said, "Mom?  Am I speaking Spanish?"