The Dance of the Chicken Nuggets

I gave my daughter some chicken nuggets for lunch. I figured there were two things that could happen:

1. She eats them.
2. She doesn't eat them.

Both of these outcomes are favorable to me because if she eats them, then I have succeeded in feeding her lunch; and if she doesn't eat them, then I, as her Dad, can eat all of the chicken nuggets that are left.

It's a win-win situation. Either she eats the chicken nuggets, or I eat the chicken nuggets. It's all good.

Or so it would seem.

My daughter, however, had a different idea. She tried, as usual, to do whatever she could to mess up my plan. She had a two-prong attack:

A. Eat the least amount of chicken nuggets as possible and also...
B. Eat some of each nugget in order to prevent me from eating the nugget.

When she finished, it looked a little something like this:

Five nuggets. Five bites.

She executed her plan to perfection. She had five chicken nuggets. She took five bites. She took one bite out of each nugget. She minimized the amount of nugget eaten while maximizing the damage to each individual nugget. She had won the chicken nugget war!

Or so it seemed.

She forgot one simple fact: Daddy has no shame. You see, she is my third child, so I've been to this rodeo before. My first child was able to fend me away from her chicken nuggets by taking a bite out of each one. But, by the time I've gotten to Thing 3, a little slobber is not going to stop me. If Daddy wants a chicken nugget the only way for her to keep Daddy from eating that chicken nugget is to eat all of it so there is none left for Daddy.

For Daddy, chicken nuggets are always a win-win situation. (Especially with honey-mustard sauce!)

Edited from a post originally published on 3/28/2017.