Last week, while I was staying with my mom at the hospital, my wife had some issues with the boys picking on each other. At one point, it reached a level so high that it inspired her \u00a0to have the brilliant idea of charging a quarter each time one of them touched the other. It didn’t matter why the contact was made. Her rule was simple: if you touch your brother, you owe her a quarter.<\/p>\n
The boys did extremely well at not losing money. There were some giggly moments when they were obviously not telling her about incidents that should have cost them a quarter, but that was fine.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, after having been briefed on the new quarter rule, it was my turn to watch the boys.<\/p>\n
“Give me five,” my oldest said, raising his hand in front of his little brother.<\/p>\n
“Wait,” I said. “Won’t that cost him a quarter?”<\/p>\n
The little miscreant grinned at me. “Aw, Dad!”<\/p>\n
“That wouldn’t be fair,” his little brother said. “Cause we’re both giving the high five. It should cost us both a quarter.”<\/p>\n
“Okay,” I said. “High five away. I could use the cash.”<\/p>\n
“But that would mean,” the older one said, “that we’d both get charged a quarter any time we touched. If that’s the rule, I could slug him and it would cost us both a quarter.”<\/p>\n
“Definitely not the rule.” I said. “You touch him, you owe me a quarter.”<\/p>\n
“Wait,” he said. “Are you saying that it only<\/em> costs me a quarter if I hit him? Nothing else?”<\/p>\n “And you get in trouble,” I said emphatically. “Big trouble.”<\/p>\n “Oh.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I narrowly avoided a major problem with this one. Enjoy!<\/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":[123,118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-yP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159","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=2159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}