The dining room has a strange effect on the girl. She giggles. She explodes. She nearly chokes to death trying not to laugh. Once, all-too-memorably, during a dining room dinner, she spit milk all over the boy’s then-girlfriend. We cleaned milk splatter from the distant corners of the room, finding additional random splats in hidden places weeks later. I will never, as long as I live, forget the look on the girlfriend’s face.

We ate in the dining room last night because the girl’s Valentines were spread all over the kitchen table as she was mid-addressing when dinner was ready. I made polenta as a side dish with our chicken and green beans, just for something new and different.

The boy was in rare form. “Would you like some more polenta?” I asked.

“No, I would not like more placenta,” he said, glaring at me with a twinkle in his eye. “You are a sick, sick woman.”

The girl almost lost it and had to get up from the table about three times so as not to shower us with milk or bits of food. If we laugh, she laughs. If we tell her to stop laughing, she dissolves into a shivering pool of giggly Jell-o.

For some reason, “You are not allowed to laugh in the dining room,” does not do the trick.

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