The other morning, as my wife was still snoozing, my five-year old had a brilliant idea.<\/p>\n
“Hey Daddy, let’s make a surprise breakfast for Mom!”<\/p>\n
Great idea. What were you thinking?<\/p>\n
“Chocolate covered bananas and strawberries.”<\/p>\n
“I’ll cut the bananas,” his older brother chimed in.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, we were out of bananas, strawberries, too. In fact, the only fruit we had in the house was apples.<\/p>\n
“Okay,” he said. “Chocolate covered apples!”<\/p>\n
We washed the apples, cut them into wedges, and arranged them in a bowl, then started the search for chocolate sauce. No luck.<\/p>\n
“Hmm,” I said. “This isn’t much of a surprise. It’s just a bowl of apples.”<\/p>\n
“I know,” the little guy said. “Let’s do a surprise drink!”<\/p>\n
“What did you have in mind?”<\/p>\n
“We’ll need marshmallows.”<\/p>\n
We found some marshmallows leftover from Christmas. They were pink and green, but seemed squishy and okay. Do marshmallows go bad? I don’t think so. I got three glasses out of the cupboard: one for each boy, and one for their momma.<\/p>\n
The five-year old filled each one with water, dumped a handful of marshmallows in, and started stirring. The water turned pink at first, and then the green took over.\u00a0 After floating a bright yellow peep (which is a sugared marshmallow chicken) on top of each one, he carried the glasses to the table.<\/p>\n
We guided\u00a0my wife\u00a0to her special breakfast drink.<\/p>\n
Now came the fun part.<\/p>\n
She managed to keep her smile when she looked in her cup, saw the fluorescent yellow marshmallow chicken floating in the murky green water, surrounded by bobbing marshmallows.<\/p>\n
She even managed to say “mmm, that’s delicious” when she touched it to her lips.<\/p>\n
She didn’t however, manage to open those lips when the cup touched them.<\/p>\n
“Drink up,” I said, helpfully. “It’s best if you take a big gulp and chew the marshmallows as they go down.”<\/p>\n
“No,” she said. “I prefer to sip. What else did you make?”<\/p>\n
“Apples, but no chocolate sauce. We’re out.”<\/p>\n
“That’s okay,” she answered. “This drink is delicious all by itself.”<\/p>\n
Satisfied that his creation was sufficiently appreciated, my five-year old took a sip from his own glass. His face crinkled up.<\/p>\n
“What’s wrong?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“It’s not very good,” he said. “It’s just like water, doesn’t have much taste.”<\/p>\n
“That’s too bad. Momma likes it, though. Maybe she’ll drink yours.”<\/p>\n
Heh, heh, heh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today’s story actually has a moral. If you can figure it out, post it in the comments!<\/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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","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=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}