My wife left me yesterday. Don’t worry, though -- she’ll come crawling back, just like always. That’s how tired she typically is after a long business trip. What did you think I was talking about?

She flew out early yesterday afternoon for a two-week training session in Peoria, Illinois. Leaving me with a couple of things to handle.

Thing 1 is a charming-but-precocious, preternaturally smart seven-year-old with a penchant for stalling and losing focus on the world around him as he brings it all to bear on some fascinating fact in an almanac, or something shiny.

Thing 2 is a deceptively cute, street-smart three-year-old who reveals an evil glint in his eyes whenever he smiles at me, and who has an appetite for sugar and destruction.

For ten business days, my mission is to wake them, dress them, feed them, drop them off, go to work, pick them up, feed them, bathe them, dress them, and get them to bed. It might not sound so bad, but with my wife out of town, you have to understand -- the total parental manpower in this household has been reduced by a good 75 percent....

She knows it, too. She pre-arranged as much as she possibly could, to make the job easier for me. Part of me wanted to be offended by the patronizing aspect of that, but most of me was grateful.

I have to say, though, that it reminded me of those weeks during high school, when Mom and Dad had to leave town, and they sort of “trusted” me to take care of the place in their absence. Mom would stack the freezer with pre-cooked meals, in order by weekday, with a menu and cooking instructions taped to the front of the freezer door. Dad would leave a note along the lines of, “No parties, no drinking, no girls!”

My wife did most of that, but forgot to forbid parties and girls. Either she knows she can trust me, or she knows I’ll be too exhausted to misbehave.

It starts with breakfast. For whatever reason, our boys are hooked on instant grits. I don’t know who introduced them to instant grits, but I’d sure like to have a conversation with that person now.

I hate instant grits. Not their taste, but their very presence. They are impossible to clean up, and if left unchecked, will multiply like Tribbles. When Thing 2 is finished with his breakfast, he has grits down his shirt, up his nose, on the table, on the floor, on his sleeves, on the cat, in his lap, in his shoes, in his hair, and between his fingers. And every attempt to clean them simply relocates the mess from one spot to another. You can’t get rid of them! They are one of the few things in our house that will make me cuss like my dad.

But the boys love them, and it does provide them with a warm, nutritional breakfast that’s not packed with sugar. So my wife forbears, and offers to handle feeding them -- and cleaning up -- breakfast each day.

Doing so this week, however, would entail a fairly pesky commute, so she went to great lengths to help me avoid dealing with grits in her absence. It’s called bribery. She told the boys they’d get to do “special” breakfasts over the next two weeks, and let them pick out a variety of those round, allegedly single-serving containers of sugared cereal: Lucky Charms, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, and Frosted Mini-Wheats -- a poor dentists’ dream come true for a five-drilling invoice.

We figured I wouldn’t have to deal with the grits, but I also wouldn’t have to deal with the sugar highs. If they eat the cereal in the car, I can drop them off before the rush kicks in, and they’re suddenly their teachers’ problems.

Thing 2 loved this idea. He was especially excited about the Apple Jacks, holding one of the containers and singing “Ackle Jack, Ackle Jack!” as loudly as he could while he sat in the grocery cart Saturday. He wanted to open them immediately, but my wife explained they’re for breakfasts, after she goes to Peoria.

She wasn’t a minute out of our neighborhood yesterday afternoon when he asked, “Daddy, Mommy gone to Pee-oowa?”

For a second, I felt sorry for him -- I thought he was going to cry because he was already missing her. Instead, he shouted, “Yay! Now we hab Ackle Jack!”

“No, Sugarbear, those aren’t for a snack; those are for breakfast.”

“Den I want bepfuss now.”

“No, breakfast is for morning.”

“Den I want Ackle Jack for snack.”

“Oh, look -- it’s the Wii! Have I shown you how to play this yet?”

I was proud of myself for the rest of the day, distracting him with a video babysitter and addressing the issue whenever he remembered to bring it up. It takes a firm stance, and insistence that Apple Jacks are not a good snack, they are for a specific meal.

Unfortunately, that meal turned out to be dinner. The boys enjoyed it, though, and were more than cooperative for the rest of the night.

Once I had them in bed, I set about planning this morning’s routine, only to discover that she’d left precious little to plan. There was a box of Pull-ups, spare Diego underwear, and car snacks in the passenger seat; Thing 1’s backpack already had a week’s worth of morning snacks packed in its pocket, and there was sticky note reminding me to pack the perishable lunch items that she couldn’t pack in advance.

I shook my head and smiled to myself as I put the backpack down and returned the unneeded Monday snack I was holding, back to the pantry. I was closing the pantry door when something caught my eye. There were still five days’ worth of cereal cups on the shelf. After I’d caved on the Apple Jacks, I’d resigned myself to the inevitable grit war that I would have to wage on one of the mornings, since we’d used up one cereal allotment per Thing.

But there, among the neatly stacked microwaveable dinners arranged by preferred date, I spotted another pair of cereal cups. Apple Jacks. I halfway expected to see a note from her along the lines of, “No caving!”

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