A Little Harmless Bribery

“Puck? What were you doing in there, son?”

Oxbear was trying to get Puck moving on that early school morning. And from Oxbear’s perspective, Puck was dawdling.

“Dad, I was just blowing my nose. With my hand.”

We spent most of our day at the Big House. Carrie-Bri and I had a little podcasting to catch up on, now that the season was almost drained out. And Mom was coming home on a 9:12pm flight from Germany, en route through Copenhagen and Chicago.

“Yali! Yali!”

One stubborn little nino protested being carted away by Heidi to play after carpool. He was in one of his many “moods”. But Heidi knew how to coax him out of it.

“Fredbird? Fredbird? Cake?”

However, when these suggestions didn’t completely fix the situation, I suggested she try the next-best option. Candy. The things I let this kid have that Puck never got away with on a regular basis.

Two minutes later, Heidi was busy hunting for Smarties in her dad’s desk.

“He tried to hide them from me,” she said. “But I found them.”

When Yali went back for seconds though, he wasn’t so thrilled when I said “no”.

“Yali! Yali!” Heidi coaxed him away, “Candy? Candy? It’s okay. I’m just giving him peanuts,” she told me.

And fortunately for everyone involved, Yali believed her. Peanuts were now officially candy.

When we got back to the Silverspoon’s, Puck filled me in on goings-on at school. As usual, the grossest stories took top pick.

“Our teacher showed us a video about a hippopotamus pooping in the water! And then the fish ate all the poop!”

“That’s nice.”

“SO, Mom! GUESS WHAT?”

“What?”

“I’M NEVER EATING FISH AGAIN!”

This kid will always look for some good excuse to not eat fish. And I had to hand it to him – he had found a pretty good one.