Ever since my wife went in for heart surgery, friends have been bringing us food. Dinners, desserts, snacks… It’s been absolutely wonderful, and a huge help to me.<\/p>\n
A few days back, dinner arrived with eclairs. There were four of them, each far too big for the kids to eat at a single sitting. I \u00a0forced the boys to split one for their dessert that evening. They argued, but I held my ground.<\/p>\n
Then I hid the last eclair in the back of the fridge. I’m careful never to steal the kids’ treats, but if they forget about something… well, then it’s fair game.<\/p>\n
As we were finishing dinner last night, the boys remembered their eclair.<\/p>\n
“I think it may have been eaten,” I said.<\/p>\n
They looked at each other with accusing glares, then at me. “Da-addy!” they accused.<\/p>\n
“I’m not saying it was eaten. Just that it may have been.”<\/p>\n
“You – you…” my youngest son sputtered.<\/p>\n
“If you ate our eclair,” his older brother threatened. “I’m gonna – ”<\/p>\n
“I’m not saying I did! I’m just saying that it might be gone.”<\/p>\n
My youngest stood up. “I’m going to look.”<\/p>\n
“No.” I said. “Finish your dinner.”<\/p>\n
“But – ”<\/p>\n
“It’s okay,” my wife interrupted. “You can go look.”<\/p>\n
“Wait!” I said.<\/p>\n
Too late. He was already digging through the fridge.<\/p>\n
“It should be right in the front if it’s still there,” I said weakly.<\/p>\n
“Found it!” He held up the missing eclair.<\/p>\n
“Hmph.”\u00a0I glared at my wife. “I guess no one ate it, after all.”<\/p>\n
Laughing, they divided it up between the two of them.<\/p>\n
You know what’s worse? They didn’t even offer me a bite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was the perfect crime, and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-tg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}