Functioning with the Dinner Table Rule

Our house is filled to the brim with relatives--a happy kind of chaos. As we gathered around the dinner table last night, The Boy halted all conversation with this announcement:

"Everybody! Everybody! The rule at the dinner table is: no interruptering."

Slight pause. Then a sister pointed out, "But you interruptered us to say that."

Everybody laughed. The Boy growled and put his head down on the table for an instant, then looked up and laughed with everybody else.

He was interrupted several times during the meal. "Excuse me," he would say. "Excuse me everybody, but when I'm talking about my school, I don't like to be interruptered."

We pointed out that sometimes during conversation, the subject shifts from one thing to another; that we didn't exactly interrupt. It was just that something he said caused the discussion to go in another direction. He didn't like this very much, but we let him sing two songs and all was well.