Parental dilemmas

Sometimes it's hard not to encourage misbehavior with laughter. That's just a function of the fact that misbehavior is often absolutely hilarious. Just not hilarious in a way that you want to see repeated in various iterations over the next five years.

Case in point. Tonight at the dinner table Wild Thing spears some of his tempeh ...

... oh, tempeh. For those of you who don't make it a staple of your diet, here is a handy introduction. It's good with barbecue sauce, which is how we were eating it tonight...

Anyway. Wild Thing spears his tempeh on his little plastic fork and starts waving it around. Fortunately the sauce is pretty thick, so he's not actually splattering food everywhere--in fact, this behavior was generating less of a mess than his actual eating, since we were having basmati rice, which isn't very sticky, so now we have basmati rice pretty much as an integral part of our dining room carpet, since he tends to aim the fork at his mouth with about the same degree of accuracy as Dick Cheney aims his shotgun at quail.

Let's see, where was I. Oh, yes, WT is waving the tempeh around in the air on his fork. We give him the usual reprimands--keep it over the table, food is for eating not for waving around, the usual. Perhaps sensing that he needed a new justification for what he was doing, WT begins singing:

"Rock-a-bye tempeh, in the tree top,
When the wind blows, the tempeh will rock ..."

At which point it became very difficult to retain credibility, since we're both chortling audibly.