Crazy morning this morning. My oldest son left with his mom at 6am for a field trip, and then I discovered that they had eaten the last of our breakfast foods.

When my youngest woke up, I took him to McDonald’s for breakfast before school.

As we got our food, he spotted the Monopoly game tags stuck to the packaging. We pulled them off. No instant winners, but one Park Place. I explained how the game worked, and we spent breakfast chatting about odds and what we’d do if we won a million dollars.

He wanted to buy a bunch more Hash Browns, but I said that chances of us getting Boardwalk (the other ticket needed to convert the Park Place ticket into a winning $1,000,000 ticket) were really small, that they always made one of the blue tickets (Park Place and Boardwalk are both dark blue) really rare.

We finished up, and as we were walking out, I dumped our trash in the trash can.

“Uh!” He stopped dead in his tracks, a stunned expression on his face. “You threw them out!”

I looked at him and then at the trash. “I wasn’t thinking,” I said. “It was just reflex.”

“But it could have been a million dollars!”

We peered down into the trash can. It was mostly empty, which meant our trash was way at the bottom, along with nasty blobs of old coffee and uneaten eggs. “I don’t think it’s worth it,” I said. “The other blue ticket is really rare. They don’t want to be giving out the million that often.”

“Unless our blue ticket was the rare one,” he said. “And all we had to do was buy one more hash brown.”

It was a sickening thought. We considered the trash again, but decided against diving in.

As we pulled into car line, we were still talking about it. “I can’t believe you threw out a million dollars,” he said as he climbed out of the car.

“Me neither.” I paused. “Don’t tell your momma.”

He laughed. “I’ll say!”