When my son turned eight, while older, he was still my spiller of all things liquid and had a voice that could break the sound barrier.  He is still working on his listening skills, so I often have to tell him things more than once to get his attention, let alone a response, so telling him that running around my desk while flailing his arms and shouting “Surrender earthlings!!!” wasn’t desirable, it didn’t get much of a response until the splattering of coffee, combined with the sound of shattering glass reached his ears and registered in his eyes.  They grew open wide in surprise and anxiety, awaiting my reproach at the reaction to his breaking my favorite coffee mug as he shouted, “It was an accident!!!”  After lifting him up to keep his bare feet from suffering the bloody fate awaiting them, I looked at the broken pieces sadly and responded to him with, “So were you!”
My son got an aquarium for his tenth birthday, complete with fish and an algae eater.  When he was deciding on names for his new pets — Yes, we name fish in our house – he asked what he should name the algae eater.  I told him that when I had an aquarium, I had called my algae eater Horatio for the Horatio Alger books my father used to tell me about, with a slight change in the last name.  He said that he didn’t like that name, so I suggested he think of one on his own basing his decision on what the animal does, and since I said, ”He sucks like a Hoover.”  He laughed and his pet became “Hoover”.  
Another time, my son was lying on the attic floor as I came up the stairs and he looked down at me saying, “I can see all your grey hairs up here.”  
My response, “Keep it up and you’re gonna be having all your meals up there.”
When motherhood gets to be too stressful, a subtle mention of the words “mom-shaped hole” with just the right expression on my face tells them that I am dangerously close to running at top speed to break through the wall to the outside world.  That normally calms them down, lowers their voices, or sends them to another room long enough to compose myself and prepare for the next round.