Table Talk

We have a hard time with polite conversation around the table. The boys often want to play quiz-style math games or they want to mercilessly tease each other. A favorite tack is to pretend to see something and then when the person turns around chant "Baby look! Baby look! Now you're in the baby book!" So, I am always grateful when we can all just talk. Calmly. Without fighting. This means that I try to answer any question asked at the table as a means to demonstrate polite conversation. At breakfast recently, Gabriel asked, "Mom, can things be infinitely small?"
Wow, really? "Yes, things can be infinitely small just like they can be infinitely big."
"So, people can be infinitely small?"
"No, but the parts that make up people can be infinitely small. Like, we are made of cells which are made of organelles, which are made of DNA which is composed of proteins which are made up of amino acids which are molecules made of atoms and there are even subatomic particles like quarks."
Then there were questions about quarks and what might be smaller than quarks even.
At this point, the younger boys jumped into the conversation.
Benjamin: "Yeah, things can be really small! Like germs!"
David John: (still stuck on the idea of infinitely small people) "Germans could be smaller than a germ.... if you had a shrink ray."
Tobias: "We don't want Germans in our body! Yuck!"

We then had to talk about the fact that Germans and germs are not the same thing and that Germans are lovely people. In fact Aunt Tine is German etc. etc. By the end I think everyone was thoroughly confused. Maybe polite conversation isn't all it's cracked up to be. At least with the "Baby look!" game no one needed a nuclear physicist around to sort things out and Europeans weren't being accused of causing illness. I think we may go back to the math quiz bowl version of table interaction. I guess Marc and I will have to discuss it over dinner.