Our son Paul has developed two intriguing, yet conflicting wants at the same time: to entertain us but also to control the extent to which we are entertained. Frequently he will do something hilarious and then indignantly say "Stop laughing!" The thing is, though, there is nothing funnier than a tiny person, especially one who frequently has driven you to the brink of insanity, demanding that you stop laughing at something funny he did (I'm not talking, of course, about laughing at him when he's in legitimate pain or distress, although sometimes, like last night, when he was mad he didn't get all the cereal he wanted for dinner, and he thought life was quite hard, it was still kind of funny.) But in general, the more he wants you to stop laughing, the funnier it is:

As you can see from above we tried convincing him we weren't laughing for awhile but the other day we'd had enough. Paul was singing a song or talking or something something when very suddenly he said "I love you" in a robot voice (sort of like this, but in a baby way) Steve and I burst out laughing. "No, no laughing!" Paul said and we finally said "No, Paul, when you do something funny, people are going to laugh. It means we're happy." So far our message isn't quite working: Paul still wants to be in charge of when we laugh but at least we don't have to hide it anymore and he has to learn a valuable lesson: if you don't want people to laugh, don't be funny.