Unbeknownst to the Chesterfield, Michigan, father, the boy had placed approximately $1,000 worth of Grubhub orders at various local restaurants when he allowed him to 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 his son, who hid under his duvet.
“I don’t know,” Mason replied. “I was hungry.”
All Mason wanted to know when his dad was in the middle of a reprimand was whether the pepperoni pizzas had arrived yet. (The pizzas did not survive. Stonehouse’s bank rejected the $439 request as fraudulent, the 43-year-old father told The Washington Post.)
“I had to keep getting out of [his] room 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 a “real talk” with Mason, Stonehouse said. Both explained that he had essentially stolen from his father and that he 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 show you one by one,” Stonehouse said. “He was a little devastated, but he understood.”
The food, thankfully, did not go to waste, Stonehouse said. The family invited other relatives to dinner. A neighbor offered to buy all the jumbo shrimp orders. And they still eat leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Stonehouse said.
However, Mason has not been allowed to eat anything. “We didn’t want to glorify it,” Stonehouse said. “This is not something funny.”
Maybe not for at least a decade. The family has joked about buying the exact order for Mason’s prom or after-wedding party, Stonehouse said.
For now, the boy is still dealing with the consequences of his actions.
“I have to start [my piggy bank] all over again?” Mason recently asked his father.
“Yes, Mason,” Stonehouse replied. “Sometimes in life, when you make a mistake, you have to start over.”
