This whole string has made me remember a long car trip my husband and I once took through Nova Scotia and PEI. We drove and drove every day, talking all the while. When we would stop for meals, we'd often pull our our books and read for a change -- after all, we'd just talked for hours straight. I remember getting a laugh at the idea that some young honeymoon couple would see us and say, "Isn't that sad -- they have nothing to say to each other. Don't worry, honey, we'll never be like that!"
Breakfast is kind of like that a lot anyway for a lot of people. At our house, we like to read the paper at breakfast. We talk now and then, but mostly we read the paper. I doubt I was able to do that when the kidz were home, especially when they were little, though. Although I'm not sure that the talk at the pre-school and -work breakfast table would have qualified as "conversation" anyway! At dinner, we always shut everything off, and we still do -- except sometimes when there is a baseball game on we both want to see.