The Quiet Game

We were going to dinner the other night with a full car.   In the front seats were my husband and Uncle Brian, the children were in the middle row and Uncle Bob and I were in the third row.   We were trying to talk about something across the three rows as adults.   I don't really remember what the topic was, but I do know we couldn't hear each other because the children were very, and I mean very, loud.

They may well have been yelling, I'm not sure, but I know it was louder than it should have been in the car.    Sometimes when we're alone, without a car behind us and we're not running late, we'll do things like stop the car and put them on the side of the road until they calm down.    This is only if they don't quiet down with a calm reminder that we use inside voices in the car.   In this case, they had energy and they were unable to express it physically while being restrained in car seats.    I understood, but we still needed to get them to quiet down.

My husband said, "let's play the quiet game."   We'd tried this once or twice before so it was new and rather novel to them.   Immediately everyone got quiet but after ten or fifteen seconds mumblings from the adults or giggling from the children happened and round one was over.

"Let's play again.  Okay, on the count of three, everyone be quiet," my husband said.   As he counted down to one, we all became quiet in anticipation of the game starting.   About a second into the silence, my daughter loudly yelled out, "quack!"   We all couldn't help but laugh and round two was over.

For the rest of the rounds, "quack" always followed, "three" and our game became rather moot.   I have no idea what prompted my three-year-old to yell quack, but if you ever need the quiet game to be over quickly, it's a sure fire way to end the game.

The Big Boy Update:  Uncle Bob was making soup for our family the other day.   My son asked him, "Uncle Bob, are you making feel better soup?"   Uncle Bob told him he was.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Our family left yesterday.   After Uncle Bob and Uncle Brian headed off to the airport, my daughter asked us, "where is Uncle Brian's bed?"  Aunt Kelly said she'd go downstairs with my daughter to look in the bedroom.    Uncles Bob and Brian had taken their things with them, so the room was back to its regularly unoccupied state that's sometimes slept in by Uncle Jonathan.  My daughter came back upstairs and said, "It's uncle Jon's bed again."  It was very sweet how she said it; you could tell she was said Uncle Brian had gone.