Saturday was the first cross-country meet of the season. My oldest is eight years old now, which means he gets to run a mile instead of a half-mile. He seemed to be not too concerned about the extra distance, at least not until Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
That’s when I found him sitting at the kitchen table with\u00a0his head in his hands.\u00a0 “Daddy,” he said, “I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”<\/p>\n
“No?”<\/p>\n
“No. And I haven’t had a chance to practice.”<\/p>\n
I talked him off the table and into the car. The races went well. My youngest ran first (with the six-and-under crowd), and then my oldest did his mile, which was two times around the track.<\/p>\n
After all the congratulating was over, I asked him if it was hard.<\/p>\n
“Nah,” he said.<\/p>\n
“What about at the start of the second lap?” I asked. “I thought coming around and seeing you had a whole nother lap to do would be tough.”<\/p>\n
“Nah,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You know,” his little brother said, “I think I did two laps too.”<\/p>\n
We looked at him.<\/p>\n
“I mean, by mistake. I think I ran two laps instead of one.”<\/p>\n
“Hmm,” I said. “You think someone watching might have noticed you running an extra lap after everyone else had stopped?”<\/p>\n
“Well…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s an attention-getter that isn’t terribly subtle. Funny, but not subtle. Enjoy!<\/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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-ha","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","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=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}