Don't Talk With Your Mouth Full Either

I had, in the past, never really given any though to the rules that I would lay down for my children. I guess I figured that they would come to me when the situation required it. So far, this has been a valid assumption, but above all other rules we've had to lay down, one easily surpasses all others in weirdness: no farting at the dinner table.

This is a really odd rule for a few reasons. First, I don't recall this being an issue in my family, which is not to say that it wasn't (I've probably mentioned before that my recall is pretty bad for anything that happened before, say, two weeks ago). Growing up, my family had a strict policy of freedom to flatulate, and that freedom was exercised at every opportunity. Almost any occasion not involving guests (and some that were) would be punctuated with a hodge-podge of trumpeting that would make any orchestra tear with pride. Well, their eyes would water anyway. I don't remember it happening at the table though, and it seems like I would because, you know, it's funny.

The other reason that this is a strange rule is that it's so difficult to enforce. The princess, for all of her delicate and feminine traits, is so prodigious a producer of methane that at any moment I expect Al Gore himself to show up at my doorstep. As a result, she is the sole reason for the rule's existence.

Don't get me wrong - she tries to obey. Frequently during mealtimes, she'll ask to be excused so she can discreetly walk around a corner and release whatever she has been holding at bay. This doesn't always happen, and seriously, how do you reprimand someone when you're giggling? Even worse is when she realizes what she's done, and tries to make it better, either through an "Excuse me" for each escaped squeak (frequently in groups in an effort to catch up on a set of them), or worse, "May I be excused so I can go take care of the rest of this?", which left me in ruins, as it was delivered with complete sincerity.

I shudder to think of what other rules I will have to not only create but actually attempt to enforce as parenthood goes on, but I can not imagine that there will be another that is so hard to enforce with a straight face. Years from now, when the Princess is furious with me because I wrote about this on the internet (with my broad audience of around four), I'm sure we will have come up with something. Hopefully, that something will not involve bodily functions