Deepest, darkest secrets

My son called to me from the kitchen the other day, saying he wanted to tell me a secret "in [my] ear". This in itself is a big step forward, as most of his secrets and other private thoughts have thus far been expressed at the highest volume possible in everyone's ears who happened to be wandering through the county at the time.

He couldn't wait two minutes, so he ran out to me, tried to lean over to my ear and said "I can..." then, unsatisfied with his proximity to my ear, leaped up and held himself up impressively on the arm of my chair, to whisper almost inaudibly, "I can jump up and down... I can jump up and down."

He said this twice, like many other things he says, for no apparent reason. "Outside," he added as an important footnote, so as not to incur yet another of my cruel, vicious lectures about what we do inside and what we do outside. (Of course, everything truly fun is supposed to take place outside, a magical place we never, ever visit.)

Anyway, he somehow decided this ability really was a secret, forgetting that he debuted it long ago, and that he had displayed it as recently as that afternoon. He actually had the tone of someone saying (picture Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense), "I can make things happen with my mind."

So now we know that, some night when a burglar is holding us at gunpoint, D- can just begin jumping up and down, baffling this intruder with his stunning superhuman ability, while I debut my less-impressive secret power of skipping from side to side, and J- suddenly begins miraculously cartwheeling around all of us. I imagine one of us would just have to carry the baby out of the room, because even if her power was ready to manifest itself, she'd still demand to be carried (imagine a big toothless baby smile here).