Conversation overload

All the baby books discuss the quandary of the stay-at-home mother of an infant who is stuck in the house with a nonverbal entity all day and is desperate for conversation when her husband gets home. Very few of them deal with the what-goes-around-comes-around payback four years later, when the stay-at-home mom is stuck in the house all day with a preschooler who WILL NOT SHUT UP.

Eric has reached this stage now. He just talks all day long about this, that, the other, or nothing at all. Airplanes, sunsets, his math lesson, the cat, a cartoon he saw last week: They're all fair game for discussing repetitively for ten or fifteen minutes until the next topic comes up. I spend all day saying, "Uh huh ... yeah ... wow ... mmhmm." By the time Tommy gets home, I just want to put the kids to bed and enjoy the silence. (Of course, they're in the mood to play with Daddy and make noise.)

I remember Faith being in this constant-talking stage, and she's passed out the other side of it now; but I don't remember how long it took for her to go through it.