Another Genius Moment in Parenting

I am patting myself on the back here for my cunning use of psychology / child development / sheer awesomeness.

Let me back up.  We have a "breakfast bar" with two stools.  Identical stools.  Side by side.  The kids eat breakfast there every day and for some reason when we moved into this house it did not occur to us to assign seats at the bar (the way we did at the dining room table).

So every now and then they'd switch seats.  No big deal.  No one seemed to care.  For a while.

Then one day one of them declared the seat on the right their "favorite seat" and requested to sit in it from that day forward until the end of time.  I'm sure (if you have been paying attention to past events) I don't need to explain that this only caused the other child to also decide the stool on the right was the favorite.

What to do?  I couldn't just give it to the first kid who asked for it.  And I couldn't give it to the other.  We had clearly missed the window of opportunity for parents to assign breakfast seats--there was no way to assign them now without favoring one child and angering the other.  I tried to start a system of alternating who sat in Favorite Seat, but it was hard to remember whose turn it was.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I decide to capitalize on their other regular morning argument -- who gets to select the music we listen to at breakfast.  While trying to hide my own pride in my Genius Plan, I declared to my children that each day one child could sit in Favorite Seat and the other child could choose the morning music.  They immediately agreed.  And it worked!

For about a week.

Yes, for one glorious week there was no arguing over the chair or the music.  They decided for themselves who would sit where each day.  Some days Tai would happily sit in Favorite Chair and put up with the Tangled Soundtrack, while other days Quynh would enjoy her perch in the Best Seat while begrudgingly listening to the Star Wars Pandora Station.
 
Until they decided that choosing the music was way more important than where they sat.  So now they argue over the Other Chair.  FML.