Local Preschooler Achieves Personal Best in Pork-Based Arithmetic (A Comic Take)

A LaughParty comic take.

Comic take, not a news report: everything below is invented for fun. The family, the pig-related incidents, and the math professor are all fictional.

In a kitchen that exists only in our imagination, a four-year-old named Juniper declared that lunch would be breakfast. Her parents, who had long ago learned that arguing with a preschooler is like arguing with weather, nodded and reached for the pancake mix.

The plan was simple. Cook a whole package of bacon so it wouldn't sit in the fridge, judging us with its little striped face. Everyone would share. This is the sentence that has launched a thousand family sitcoms.

Juniper heard it differently. In her mind, the plan was: Bacon arrives. Juniper handles it.

Within minutes, the platter looked like a crime scene where the only evidence was a single grease-shiny napkin. Her father counted the survivors. Her mother counted them again, the way you recount your change after a suspicious vending machine.

'Did you eat the bacon?' asked Dad.

'Some,' said Juniper, with the calm of a bank manager.

Then came the dreaded moment every parent knows: the math. Dad, who hadn't done a calculation since a long-ago tip at a pizza place, squinted at the ceiling. Juniper weighs about as much as a medium bag of dog food. The bacon she'd eaten weighed about as much as a hardcover book. Somewhere in the swirl of numbers, he realized his daughter was now, technically, a small but measurable percentage pig.

'She's part bacon,' he whispered.

'We're all part something,' said Mom, who had found the last piece hiding under a pancake and was eating it quickly, the way you grab the final lifeboat.

Our fictional family's pediatrician, Dr. Plumtree, who lives only in this paragraph, was reportedly unbothered. 'Four-year-olds eat like tiny weather systems,' she said. 'Tuesday it's all noodles, Wednesday it's one grape and a dream. Offer fruit, offer water, and let the chaos pass.'

And they did. Juniper chased her bacon with strawberries and a cup of water, which she drank while wearing a cape. Balance was achieved, in the loosest possible sense of the word.

By evening, she had moved on completely. Dinner was rejected on the grounds that it 'looked at her funny.' She asked for a single cracker and ate half of it, announcing that the other half was for her stuffed rabbit.

Her parents sat on the couch in the glow of a quiet house, marveling at the mystery of it all. One day she's a bacon tycoon, the next she's a cracker minimalist.

'Should we tell her?' asked Dad.

'About the percentage?'

'About the percentage.'

They decided to wait until she's old enough for fractions. Or until she asks for breakfast for lunch again, which, in this fictional household, will be Thursday.

Inspired by My child is more than 1% bacon.