Quote of the day: If you're feeling a little stiff, it's because you've become a fossil.

You are in a bit of hot water if you cannot create an armless T-Rex out of thin air. That tall, snarly dinosaur perpetually irritated due to his uselessly tiny arms can be your friend. So what if he does not exist? He is a ticket out of a plethora of questions you simply cannot have the answers to.

Probably this is how it works: the T-Rex has subdued the dog (without eating him of course), squeezed in through the exhaust vent of the kitchen and eaten all the jelly candy. As a result, your 3-year old son cannot have candy. Not right now, not today, and definitely not after 10 minutes.

You hope that he accepts that scam and moves on with life. You remember mum said dad will be in trouble if the kid eats more jelly candy.

And that would be the perfect ending to parenting troubleshooting. But kids are resilient. The next question is steeped in logic as the kid wonders how a nearly armless dino can eat up candy out of a box he clearly cannot reach far inside the kitchen cupboard. As a parent you hope that thought keeps the kid occupied. No such luck. My son comes back to ask if the T-Rex used his tail instead. If so, how? What now?

Children can be annoyingly persistent and persistently annoying especially when it comes to candy. Candy or anything that they should not be doing, or chewing, or destroying.

Once upon a time children were scolded, hit with a stick or fed to the dragons for not listening to reason. Becoming civilised and having improved our Googling skills suggest none of those techniques are beneficial. Cat videos on YouTube have shown how easily felines get distracted. Children are a lot like cats. They come to you when they are hungry or in need of having their back scratched. Otherwise, they disappear. And like cats, I thought I could distract the kid with stories that laugh at logic.

Fortunately, kid logic is easy to make up. So what do I do when he wants to have candy? Always rely on a T-Rex.

A T-Rex does not exist. No one knows what it really can do and as a result it has become magical. And most days I feel like one: confused and unable to scratch my back. Throw in enough twists and turns and he might end up feeling as confused as I am when I head to work every day.

You cannot survive unless you can tell stories. But some days, you just give in to the candy because as a parent, I feel I have become a short-armed T-Rex trying to cope with a strange world.