Perkins Palace of Pancake Pleasures

L was up at 6:00 with me this morning, so I put her to good use as a short order cook and had her help me whip up a batch of pancakes. The smoke detector only shrieked into the early morning quiet twice, so it was, all-in-all, a successful cooking adventure.  The alarm, however, summoned N who complained all teary-eyed about being woken up, but who was nevertheless extremely offended at being told he could always go back to bed.

The pancakes were soon piled on plates with butter and maple syrup at the ready.  There were regular-sized pancakes for general consumption; there were a couple of inch wide mini-pancakes for kid giggles, and there was one gigantic Daddy pancake that took up an entire plate.  Again, N was offended at not being offered a Daddy pancake.  L managed to get a good pint or two of syrup on hers before I caught her.  Meanwhile I seemed to be having some sort of isolated memory-loss event with N with regards to buttering his pancakes.  I could have sworn that I'd put butter on them twice already, but evidence appeared to indicate the contrary.  I sliced off what seemed to me to be a third pat and laid it on N's pancakes and stared it down a second or two to make sure it didn't disappear before my eyes.  It did.  On the end of N's fork.  "It tastes better before it's melted," said N through a mouthful of grease.

The kids agreed that these were the best pancakes ever and N suggested that we "open a house where we make only pancakes and let people come and eat them.  Kids wouldn't have to pay anything."  I started to point out the shortcomings of a business model that didn't charge the most ambitious customers, but I reconsidered.  Maybe we didn't have to charge the kids for the pancakes so long as we charged them for butter and syrup by the pound.