As loyal DadWagon readers know, my wife and I produced children for the basest and most superficial of reasons: so we’d have someone to fetch us beers, to clean the house, to not put us in a home one day far in the future.

Well, maybe it’s because Sasha’s only 2 years old, but we’d completely overlooked a perfectly great reason to have children—so there’s always someone around whose mind you can fuck with. But now that David Ng, one of BoingBoing’s guest-bloggers, has posted about his mind-fuckery, our own eyes are open. Ng’s brilliant idea came at a Star Wars-themed birthday party:

[W]e thought that it would be way more fun if we could convince the kids that if they used the “force” they could get the stereo to stop the music (and therefore entitling them to the act of unwrapping). This, of course, is easy to do since pretty much every stereo these days comes with a remote. Note that, obviously, the Star Wars theme was the music being played during the game.

I tell you: it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen – here you have a group of 5 year olds “concentrating” so hard, and doing the classic Jedi hand gesture at the stereo trying to make the music stop. For a Star Wars fan like myself, it was a brilliant sight to see. And just so that everyone had a chance to do it, we would also consistently get them to use the “force” all together to start the music up again (“On the count of 3: one… two… three!!).

Oh god, it’s all I can do to sit on my hands the next three years until Sasha can even vaguely begin to understand Star Wars well enough that I can trick her like this. Three years! Fuck. Well, until then I can content myself with this Volkswagen ad, also posted by Ng: