I came out of the bedroom this morning to find two upset boys waiting for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Daddy, Daddy,” my 8-year old said. “He bit my knee!”<\/p>\n
“He bit your knee?” I looked at his younger brother. “Why’d you bite his knee?”<\/p>\n
“My mouth was there, and it was open and it just happened!”<\/p>\n
“How does that just happen? Keep your mouth away from your brother.”<\/p>\n
“But Daddy,” he said. “He knee’d me in the mouth!”<\/p>\n
I looked down at the older of the two. “You hit him in the mouth with your knee?”<\/p>\n
“Well, his mouth was by my knee, and then it opened, and my knee just went right in. I didn’t mean<\/em> to. It just happened!”<\/p>\n How\u00a0the big guy’s knee could just accidentally hit his brother’s mouth, I don’t know, but I also didn’t know which of them had started this particular incident. So, lacking any great ideas, I decided to go with the ‘ignore’ option. “Okay,” I said as I walked past them. “I’m thirsty.”<\/p>\n They ran around to get in front of me.<\/p>\n “But he knee’d me in the mouth!”<\/p>\n “But he bit my knee!”<\/p>\n I stopped. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “You’re not allowed to bite knees, and you’re not allowed to knee mouths. Either we ignore this whole thing, or I have to yell at both of you, and probably even give time-outs.”<\/p>\n They considered that for a moment, and then ran back to their room to finish getting dressed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The boys have discovered the idea that if something wasn’t intentional, they can’t be blamed for it. I’ve been working hard to convince them that whole approach won’t work – but not this time. <\/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":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-gj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","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=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}