Sweet Victory!

I think that I will never seem something so delightful and just than a young fellow caught in his own logic trap. You’ll remember that Max has placed a complete singing ban on both the wife and myself, citing ‘too noisy’ as the reason. When he explains it in detail, he mentioned that our singing made it too hard to hear the things he was trying to li.
Friday night, the wife and I were trying to have a conversation after dinner while an energetic young man attempted to monopolize his mother’s attention. After a long week, he wants 100% of her attention, and I presume that I’m supposed to fade into the background with an occasional appearance as the family chef. So he was standing at the open window, hollering some sort of very loud song. I asked him to quiet down, so that we could keep talking, and he replied ‘but I like singing’. Oh really? Well, of course I had to point out that we were having a talk and he was making it too noisy to hear each other. Oh, the look on his face was worth a million bucks. I could see the idea enter his thoughts, roll around for a second, and then end up in the unpleasant conclusion that he was doing exactly the same thing that he himself complains about. To see a 3-year-old realize that he was trapped by his own rule, and that he didn’t like the taste of his own medicine, was so funny to watch that I just started laughing and laughing. He didn’t try to argue against it or create a rule modification that would work in his favour. He just backed down from the window and went over to a new activity. I swear I saw him kick the ground in a ‘dang it’ manner on his way over.