In Retrospect, This Will Be The Moment When We Lost Control of Them

My son Alex was eating at his usual lethargic pace-- everyone was long finished with dinner and he had barely started-- so I said to his younger brother Ian, "Let's go see if we can stream The Life of Mammals on Netflix," which I hoped would motivate Alex to finish his dinner, but instead he went into hysterics and Ian, feeling bad for his brother, whispered to him that he was going to stall the video by going to the bathroom for a really long time (Catherine overheard this plan and told me and we thought it was cute that he was actually doing something to help his older brother) but after Ian got out of the bathroom Alex still wasn't done with dinner and Ian was ready to watch the video but he couldn't find the piece of Halloween candy that he had selected so he coerced me into helping him look for it and I couldn't find it either, which was ridiculous, because he was just holding it and I said to him "You're driving me crazy! Where did you put it?" and finally he found it under a pillow on our little saddle stool-- which is a really weird place to leave your candy-- and it wasn't until later (with help from my wife) that I realized that this ruse, the candy-losing ruse, was also part of his stalling plan, but Ian was such a good actor that I didn't realize that I was actually falling for his plan . . . and the next morning when I asked him about it, he confessed that it was all a ruse (although he did not use the word ruse) and I am sure that when we look back, this will be the moment that we lost control.