Told my kids the Wi-Fi was broken, watched them read for 40 minutes straight
Had to pick between a flat-out lie or admitting I was tired of hearing TikTok music at 7 AM, so I said a neighbor's backhoe cut the line. They bought it completely and actually asked me what a backhoe was, has anyone else faked an outage just to get some quiet around here?
Did your kids actually stay off the screens the whole time? My buddy pulled the same trick last summer, told his boys the router overheated and needed to "rest," and they disappeared into their rooms for two hours. Turns out they just found an old tablet in a drawer and watched videos on that instead, so he got zero quiet and a dead battery. Kids are basically little hackers when it comes to finding a signal.