Hi Cricket3, Thanks for the support and the company! The kitchen incident is hilarious, but it's also telling. I haven't tried it yet, but changing dinner time to 30 mins earlier even though we're starving is also a no-no in our home - he'd rather have a glass of water first.
Maybe the only thing to do is to leave things "inadvertently" around the house, bring things up in conversation, and hopefully, it'll catch on, at some time. I've been talking about aikido for 2 years now, and oh well. Maybe it'll happen one day
.
Another poster in a different thread talked about kids outgrowing so many things she worried about in the past, so perhaps this is one of them. Only time (and life experience) will change their minds.