The kids and I ended up at an unfamiliar playground the other day. I’ve been sick, so my normal playground activities have been replaced by me just watching. While I sat in the shade of a big old oak tree, they had a great time, meeting and playing with other kids. After everyone else had left, I gathered my kids up and told them it was time to go.<\/p>\n
“One more slide?” my youngest asked.<\/p>\n
“Sure.”<\/p>\n
On the way to the slide, my oldest spotted a two story high pile of red dirt. I don’t know how they’d missed it earlier, maybe because it was a hundred feet or so away, but he immediately started running toward it. His little brother followed.<\/p>\n
“No!” I bellowed. I’m not a big guy, but I’ve developed a pretty good bellow. My sons stopped short.<\/p>\n
“Why can’t we play in it?” they asked.<\/p>\n
“Because it’s red,” I said as I walked over to them.<\/p>\n
“So?”<\/p>\n
“So if you play in it,” I said. “It’ll get you red.”<\/p>\n
My oldest threw both hands up over his head. “Awesome!”<\/p>\n
“No,” I said, grabbing their hands before they could take off again.<\/p>\n
Note to self: next time, come up with a reason they’d agree with.<\/p>\n
Come to think of it, though, I’m not sure I can think of a reason that would keep an 8-year old off a giant pile of red dirt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Exactly what do you think of when you see a giant mound of red dirt? The answer will tell you exactly how old you are.<\/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":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-hN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","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=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}