My son is a talker. By “talker” I don’t just mean that he possesses the ability to communicate through speech, or even that he uses that special gift liberally. I mean that talking is as life sustaining for him as breathing is for the rest of the living world. He wakes up every morning firing off words, a human fully-automatic weapon of the English language. The constant buzz of his sunny voice can be heard vocalizing every thought that pops into his head the day long–you might call it the white noise of our household. He even talks himself to sleep at night. Not kidding.

So Friday night, when hubby and I awoke to the plaintive sound of our son calling out to us from across the house, and Mr. Husband went to investigate, I wasn’t terribly surprised to hear the muffled but clearly cheerful notes of my son’s rapid chatter as soon as my husband entered his room. Hey! Dad! How are you this fine hour of 4 a.m.? However, since my husband didn’t immediately return, and it was, as I mentioned, an hour that I knew would not incline him to stay for a casual chat, I shuffled after him to see what was up.

As it turns out, our son, ah–how can I put this in a manner that won’t offend weak stomachs (like mine)–became ill all over his bed. Hooray. The stomach virus.

Mr. Husband stripped the soiled bedding and banished it to the washing machine while I herded a very talkative six-year-old into the shower. “I didn’t get wet,” he told me somewhere in the middle of a stream of ceaseless chatter, most of which did not penetrate my half-sleeping state of mind, “only my feet got wet.”

Yes, that’s nice dear, IN YOU GO.

While overseeing his decontamination, and hushing him for the 342nd time so as to avoid awaking the baby, whose room is opposite his and right next to the small bathroom where he was showering, I began to doubt whether this was really a visitation of the stomach flu. He couldn’t have been any more chipper (and talkative!) if he had risen with the sun, fully rested, completely healthy, and anticipating a trip to Disneyland later in the day. Instead of cleaning the sick off his body feet in the wee hours of the morning.

He has always been pretty resilient when it comes to illnesses; a fever is usually the only thing that has the power to slow him down (notice I didn’t say stop him in his tracks). But he never had the stomach flu before and given the violent nature of that formidable virus, I didn’t think even he would be quite so perky, energetic, and gabby if that was really what was caused him to toss his cookies. There had to be some other freak explanation. Right?

WRONG. Half an hour later, he tossed his cookies for a second time–or would have, if he had any cookies to toss. After which, he resumed the business of chattering amiably.

His bed stripped bare and his carpet now needing a visit from Mrs. Wetvac (whose services we didn’t want to enlist at that time of morning and so risk waking the only member of our family getting any actual sleep), we decided to set him up on the couch for the rest of the night… where he continued to talk without ceasing, squeakily and excitedly as if this whole thing were a big adventure with the occasional inconvenience of emptying the contents–or lack thereof–of his stomach.

His enthusiasm was only heightened by husband’s gallant offer to fulfill the duties of comforter and bucket rinser, making a bed on the floor for himself near our son. (Who says chivalry is dead? As far as I was concerned, my husband deserved a medal for bravery.) I couldn’t help but wonder whether the greater sacrifice was in dealing with the expulsion of bodily fluids and the many interruptions that make sleep difficult, or the likelihood that our son would never stop talking until daybreak, making sleep next to impossible.

As my husband and I made the makeshift sick room as comfortable as possible, we exchanged glances that said, Who this chatty, lighthearted fellow who is obliged to put his head over a bucket every so often? And why does he always come up from the bucket talking again?

Is our son really the only kid on earth who doesn’t know how to have the stomach flu? Because here’s a quick tutorial: it’s not a slumber party. Generally, it leaves you dehydrated, utterly miserable, and incapable of making any sound beyond low moans that barely escape your lips, and maybe a murmured request for ice chips. You are a pathetic, nauseated, shell of a human being. And that’s how you have the flu.

At least, that’s how I have the flu.

In the end, hubby and I decided that putting a movie on for him was the only reasonable chance of curtailing the endless gabbing between the physical proofs of his illness. And it worked… sort of. I don’t think that it put a complete stop to his verbal stream of consciousness, but it got him through the last couple of hours of the short-lived flu in relative quiet, and allowed my husband to catch a few winks.

So it would appear that our son is so committed to the art of conversation that neither rain, nor sleet, nor hail, nor eating, nor drinking, nor times when it is appropriate to pipe down, nor begging, pleading, or threatening parents, nor a lack of an audience or having something worth saying, nor even THROWING UP will keep him from expressing himself through the spoken word.

We always suspected it, but now we know: we really do have one of the most talkative boys alive.