Father's Day

                              "I Love Sticking with You, Dad!"  love, Zeke

Zeke and I had big plans for Father's Day.  Ben said that all he really wanted to do was drink some good milk, sleep, and skip the squash sessions, so we decided to plan without him.
First, Zeke and I made an awesome t-shirt for Dad.  It was made using an iron-on transfer kit and I was too tired to read the full-page of instructions in font 8, much less to execute them, so I attached Zeke's artwork to the shirt using safety pins.  Then we wrapped it up.
Then, early Sunday morning, Zeke and I got to work in the kitchen while Dad "slept in" (translation:  Mike slept in his bed until 7:25am and then got up to help Ben, who was easily convinced that he could sleep for another hour or so if Dad held him in the rocking chair).
Zeke and I started one frying pan with too much oil and put eight sausage links into it.  The package said to cook for 16 minutes, so I set a timer.  Then we got a bowl and began mixing Grandpa W's awesome pancake recipe.  Zeke thinks that anything mixed by hand in a bowl is cookie dough, so he took generous samples of the batter after each ingredient was added.  He even managed to sneak an extra 1/4th cup of sugar into the pancakes while I tried to stop the sausage links from burning.
When I realized that the sausages were cooking in the pan I would normally use for pancakes, I pulled out my wok.  It's big, so it can probably cook 3 or 4 pancakes at a time, right?
Wrong.  Woks are gigantic, but it's all curved surfaces, and pancakes need flat surfaces.  My wok held just one medium sized pancake.  When I tried to flip it, Zeke insisted that he get to hold a pancake turner as well, so the pancake burned while I fished another turner out of the drawer.  The extra 30 seconds sunk me - the pancake held fast to the wok and I chipped it, bit by blackened bit, out of the wok.
                                        
Pancake number 2 went pretty much the same way, even though I oiled the wok slicker than the Gulf of Mexico.  When pancake 3 failed, I dumped the wok into the sink - black pancake and all.
By this time, Zeke had eaten a third of the pancake batter, and he had managed to drip another third of the batter onto his clothes, the stool, the counter, the cup boards below, and the floor.  I pulled out a third pan and tried to cook what was left.
When the fire alarm finally quieted down I had two breakfast plates assembled - one for Dad and one for Zeke.  Each plate held a collection of burned sausages, burned pancakes, portions of a burned toasted bagel with cream cheese, and chunks of mango violently ripped from the pit.
I poured some Dr. Pepper into a sippy cup, grabbed a fork and told Zeke it was time to wake up Daddy.
Zeke ran into the room and announced, "Time for Cer-re-re-real!"
I followed behind carrying a cookie-baking tray with Mike's breakfast plate and the sippy cup on it.  I smiled and said, "Happy Father's Day Mike!  You do such a great job as a father, we wanted to make a special breakfast in bed for you.  Zeke helped lots."
Then I set down the tray so I could take Ben from him and said, "And you need to enjoy this because we're not celebrating Father's Day again for another 5 years.  And no, you can't have syrup in the bed."

Then Ben and I went to clean up the kitchen.