After verbally agreeing to a strict two-book limit on Tuesday evening, a local seven-year-old reportedly devastated his parents by selecting a 320-page hardcover anthology as his second text.
At approximately 7:45 p.m., Toby Hendricks and his mother, Sarah, established what was believed to be an airtight bedtime agreement. Sources confirm the mother explicitly stipulated that the second-grader could choose any two books from his bedroom shelf before immediate sleep. The verbal contract, which was ratified without a parental review of the available inventory, completely failed to define the maximum page count, word density, or physical weight of the selected materials, legally obligating the mother to read the entirety of a massive commemorative Disney treasury.
The structural flaw in the agreement became glaringly apparent at 7:53 p.m. After swiftly concluding a standard five-minute reading of a board book about a sleepy badger, Toby bypassed his usual rotation of developmentally appropriate picture books. Instead, he utilized his full body weight to drag a four-pound, gold-leafed omnibus onto the mattress. When challenged, the child accurately pointed out that the volume was bound between a single front and back cover, thereby satisfying the semantic definition of one book under the agreed-upon terms.
The fundamental error here was conceding the unit of measurement without establishing a ceiling on total runtime.
As the reading entered its second hour, the seven-year-old began deploying secondary stalling tactics perfectly synchronized with the anthology’s table of contents. When his mother attempted to skim over introductory paragraphs or summarize a fourteen-page origin story about a cartoon tow truck, Toby reportedly issued a sharp vocal correction. The child pointed directly at the missed sentences, weaponizing his recent mastery of sight words to force her to read the omitted text verbatim. Furthermore, he claimed that sipping from his water bottle during chapter transitions did not count against his allotted bathroom trips.
By 9:30 p.m., a visibly exhausted David Hendricks was seen tagging in to relieve his wife at page 184. As his father sat down on the edge of the bed and cleared his throat, Toby calmly adjusted his pillows, requested his primary stuffed animal, and reminded the room that the original agreement also guaranteed two songs.