In your *face*, Emily Post

In the childhood homes of both myself and my bride, reading at the dinner table was stricly verboten. Something about it being contrary to the accepted laws of society to bury your face in a book while eating. Even if you were at a really, really good part. I never understood it: these were the same people (my father, the surgeon & my mother, the nurse) who thought it acceptable to sandwich their blow-by-blow on today's tricky colonostomy around their requests to pass the stroganoff.

Today, my bride and I delight in using the fruit of our loins as the centerpiece in our revenge against our parents. That's pretty much the reason you have kids, after all. See this, Mom? *We* taught her to do this! And contrary to all of your warnings, civilization as we know it did not crumble. Ha!

Note: that's really her book. There're no pictures in it, but she loves carrying it around and looking at it. Unless she's been hiding a copy of Hooked on Phonics, I'm pretty sure she's not actually reading it. But that's not what we tell the other parents at her nursery school.