Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy

Now imagine hearing that 35 more times in the span of 3 1/2 hours. Yesterday I decided to conduct a little experiment. I wanted to find out how many times my children say my name in the course of any given day. This idea came to me at noon and I stopped counting at 3:30 p.m. Thirty-nine times was the magic number, however, I know I missed a bunch.

I'm going to conservatively estimate that I missed at least one quarter of them due to the fact that I have learned to tune them out. When my husband realized what the little red tally marks were on the refrigerator white board, he started paying attention too. He heard several that I did not.

Only counting the ones that I heard for sure (since this is a very scientific experiment after all), that's an average of one "Mommy/Mama" (depending on which child is saying my name – Jonah calls me "Mommy" and Sadie calls me "Mama") every 5 minutes. Over the course of a day, well not even a full day since the kids are only awake for about 13 hours, that's 156 times. 1,092 in a week. 32,760 in a month. 393,120 in a year. That's a lot of "Mommies."

Now once Violet starts really talking, that will be well over 1/2 million "Mommies" per year! Maybe I'll change my name to "Daddy" and not tell anyone!