A Memoir on Upgrades, Easter Baskets, and Unexpected Favorites
Setting: Easter 2026
The kids love Texas Roadhouse. Caleb especially. And if you’ve ever been there, you know they are very good at trying to sell you something extra. Do you want your lemonade flavored? Do you want cheese and bacon? Do you want to upgrade your side?I usually wave it all off.
But Caleb has started ordering for himself, which means he now gets to hear the full pitch.
One day, he ordered fries, and when they asked if he wanted cheese and bacon, he paused like he was actually considering something important. Then he said, very seriously, “Just the bacon.”
It came out exactly how you’d expect. Bacon bits, refusing to stick to anything, sliding right off the fries.
He didn’t care.
He leaned over his plate, carefully piling the bacon onto each bite, catching whatever fell, and eating the scraps like that had been the plan all along.
Which is how I ended up thinking, months later, like a perfectly reasonable adult: you know what belongs in an Easter basket? Bacon bits.
So I bought him a bag and tucked it in with the candy.
Out of everything that day, all the candy, all the snacks, even the egg hunt, that was his favorite part. He tore into it almost immediately, then paused, looking at the bag.
“Great Value,” he read.
“…is this from Walmart?”
I hesitated. The Easter Bunny does not, to my knowledge, shop at Walmart.
“Oh,” I said. “I think so?”
That seemed good enough for him.
He opened it.
And that was it.
He spent the rest of the day guarding it, finishing the entire bag before the day was over, eating it straight out of his hands and not sharing.
Holden was not happy.
That night, I got back on Walmart and ordered more. This time, I upgraded to the larger bags. One for each of them, just to avoid a repeat situation.
When the package showed up the next day, they screamed and ran outside to get it, tearing into the box before they even made it back inside. Then they sat there eating bacon bits like it was candy. At one point, Holden went and got a spoon so he could scoop it out faster. Later, they added some to their pasta at dinner, and I eventually had to cut them off.
By the next day, the bacon bits had fully entered the family snack rotation.
First, they ate them straight from the bag.
Then they added them to their dinner.
Then Caleb asked if he could bring some to the movies, not instead of candy, but along with it.
And by the next school morning, both boys were packing up their book bags with Ziplocs full of bacon bits for snack like this was a completely normal household development.
Some kids want candy.
Mine want bacon.
This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.
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