This past Monday, a sore throat kept my seven-year old home from school. My wife was busy, and his little brother came home from school at 1:30, which meant I ended up essentially taking the day off.<\/p>\n
By evening, we were all ready to get out of the house, so I suggested the only cure I know for a sore throat: milk shakes. Steak and Shake milkshakes to be precise.<\/p>\n
On the way, though, I thought I’d score a few easy points with my oldest. “Hey big guy,” I said. “Since you’re the sick one, I’ll let you choose. Where would you like to eat?”<\/p>\n
It was, I thought, a safe question. He loves Steak and Shake, and we’d been talking about Steak and Shake, and we were almost at Steak and Shake. So, naturally, he said “Macaroni Grill.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“No!” his little brother wailed.\u00a0 “Steak and Shake! You said we could go to Steak and Shake!”<\/p>\n
Now I was in trouble.<\/p>\n
“Are you sure?” I asked the big guy. “Steak and Shake is really good. I don’t think they even have shakes at the Macaroni Grill.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” he said. “How about Sonny’s? Or that place where they cook the food at your table?”<\/p>\n
That’s when the light dawned. I’d given him the power, and he was going to use it.<\/p>\n
“No!” His little brother was crying now. “I love Steak and Shake! You said Steak and Shake!”<\/p>\n
“I know,” I said, pulling into the Steak and Shake parking lot, “but I also said he could pick.”<\/p>\n
“But it’s not fair! You said Steak and Shake!”<\/p>\n
“What about Burger King?” the big guy asked. “We haven’t been there in a long time.”<\/p>\n
“How about Steak and Shake?” I asked. “Your brother really wants to go to Steak and Shake. I\u00a0do to.”<\/p>\n
“Mmmm… No,” he said. “I don’t feel like Steak and Shake.”<\/p>\n
“NO,” his brother wailed. “IT’S NOT FAIR!”<\/p>\n
I’ll spare you the gory details of the rest of that conversation. We ended up at Macaroni Grill, and had a great time. Afterwards, we swung by Steak and Shake to get some milk shakes to go.<\/p>\n
…and I’ll never try to score easy points again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What would you do if you saw a chance to score some easy points with your kids? You’d take it, right? Me too.<\/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":[118,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-da","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816","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=816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}