The family returned from Texas yesterday, totally exhausted.<\/p>\n
As I was cooking dinner for them, I called out that it was time to set the table. My youngest ran to get silverware.<\/p>\n
My oldest, however, ran to me. “Daddy,” he asked. “Do we have one of those big hammers they use in the circus?”<\/p>\n
“What?” I turned the heat off on the stove and reached for a serving plate.<\/p>\n
“You know, the big hammers?” he\u00a0said. “The ones they use to pound the tent stakes down into the ground?”<\/p>\n
“A sledge hammer? No. We don’t have a sledge hammer.”<\/p>\n
“Oh.”<\/p>\n
“Wait,” I said, holding the plate of steaming food. “Why did you want a sledge hammer?”<\/p>\n
He flashed a goofy grin. “I was gonna pound some stakes into the floor.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t have an answer for that one. I carried the food to the table his brother was just finishing setting.<\/p>\n
I’m hoping the whole thing was just an incredibly creative way of getting out of setting the table. I’m really, really hoping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tough call on this one. Was he really just coming up with a distraction, or do I have some serious worrying to do?<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-kO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290","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=1290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}