After two days of me flying solo with the boys, their mom was back on her feet on Sunday. We celebrated by seeing Tangled and then visiting Santa at the mall.<\/p>\n
He was a great Santa, perfect look, and wonderful banter.<\/p>\n
“So, have you been good lately?” he asked.<\/p>\n
Both boys smiled. They were both sitting on Santa, one on each knee.<\/p>\n
“Yeah!”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We sure have, Santa!”<\/p>\n
“And have you been helping your mom?” Santa asked.<\/p>\n
The boys answered without hesitation:\u00a0 “Yep!”<\/p>\n
“And have you stopped hitting each other?”<\/p>\n
The smiles vanished and the eyes widened. The boys\u00a0look looked at each other, and then nervously at Santa.<\/p>\n
“Ho, ho, ho!” Santa boomed. “I got them with that one, Dad!”<\/p>\n
“You sure did, Santa.” I said.<\/p>\n
Now, let’s see if it did any good!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to a great example of what I think of as “the Gulp.” It’s that moment when you suddenly realize that everything you’ve been doing has either been wrong or insufficient, that sinking feeling that it’s already too late to fix things. When it happens to you, The Gulp is absolutely horrible. When it happens to someone else… well, then it’s kind of funny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-gg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}