K: I think I’m missing some context for your story about the eclipse
ME: Oh, that’s a common trope in literature. Some explorer would need to convince the natives of something, and he would know there was an eclipse coming up, so he would claim to be causing it in order to wow them. It’s mostly in fiction, but Columbus actually got it to work once.
K: Oh, that’s clever. I’ll have to remember to try that.
ME: Try it? Are you planning on going exploring?
K: No, I mean if we have children. When there’s an eclipse coming up, then I’ll tell them they’ve misbehaved so badly that I’m going to blot out the sun, and then I’ll tell them I’ll bring the sun back if they promise to be good, and then they’ll never misbehave again.
ME: Remember when I said that, although I appreciate your sense of humor, I would prefer you not joke about child-rearing because I can never tell if you’re serious or not and it makes me nervous?
K: I’m not joking! I had to raise my little brothers, and this sort of thing was basically the only way I managed. At one point they wouldn’t go to sleep at their bedtime, and they would stay up two hours late no matter how much I begged them. So over the course of a week, I gradually set all the clocks in the house further and further back, until they were running two hours fast. Then when the clocks said it was bedtime I would tell them to go to sleep, and they would say no, and I would pretend to be really upset, and then they would stay up until the clocks said it was two hours after their bedtime, which was their real bedtime, and for the next few weeks they were more on-schedule than they’d ever been before in their lives, until finally my parents asked me why all the clocks in the house were wrong and made me change them back.
ME: You really are going to try the eclipse thing, aren’t you?
K: …let’s see how well-behaved our future kids are.