Unbeknownst to the father from c, Michigan, the boy had placed Grubhub orders worth around $1,000 from several local restaurants when he let him use his phone to play a game before bed.
“Why did you do this?” Stonehouse, who was the only parent at home at the time, asked about her son, who hid under his duvet.
“I don’t know,” Mason replied. “I was hungry.”
All Mason wanted to know when his father was scolding him was if the pepperoni pizzas had arrived yet. (The pizzas didn’t make it. Stonehouse’s bank declined the $439 order and deemed it fraudulent, the 43-year-old father told The Washington Post.)
“I had to keep getting out of [his] bedroom and calm down,” Stonehouse said. “You want to yell at your son, but he’s only 6 years old.”
Stonehouse and his wife waited until the next morning to have the “real talk” with Mason, Stonehouse said. The two explained that he basically robbed his dad and would have to pay for some of the hot dogs, chili cheese fries, jumbo shrimp and ice cream with the $150 he had in his piggy bank, Stonehouse told the Post.
“We showed him one by one,” Stonehouse said. “He was a little devastated but he understood.”
The food, fortunately, was not wasted, Stonehouse said. The family invited other relatives for dinner. A neighbor offered to buy all the jumbo shrimp orders. And they still eat leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Stonehouse said.
Mason, however, was not allowed to eat it. “We didn’t want to glorify that on him,” Stonehouse said. “It’s not a funny thing.”
Maybe not for at least a decade. The family joked about buying the exact order for Mason’s graduation party or wedding after-party, Stonehouse said.
For now, the child is still dealing with the consequences of his actions.
” Do I Start [my piggy bank] again?” Mason recently asked his father.
“Yes, Mason,” Stonehouse replied. “Sometimes in life, when you make a mistake, you have to start all over again.”
