For me, facial hair is sort of a hobby. It takes me about a month to grow a beard, two months if I’m going for the viking look. I don’t really have a preference one way or another, but I tend to stay clean shaven more often than not.<\/p>\n
However, I did grow one for my recent trip to New York.<\/p>\n
While I was away, J and the kids took a plane to go visit her family. We left at the same time but I returned a day or so earlier than they did. <\/p>\n
All of this has just been long way of saying that we’d been apart for eight days. For me, eight days is a long time to be away from my family. The longest, in fact, that I’ve gone. So when I went to the airport to pick them up, I bought a big chocolate thing that was filled with smaller chocolate things and had the words “Welcome home!” written on it.<\/p>\n
Then I waited. And waited. And waited.<\/p>\n
When they finally arrived, C was barely awake. Fortunately, his little brother happily came into my arms.<\/p>\n
As we looked at each other, he reached over to pat my beard, smiled tenderly, and said “Gus!”<\/p>\n
Who’s Gus, you ask? Well, that would be the dog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For me, facial hair is sort of a hobby. It takes me about a month to grow a beard, two months if I’m going for the viking look. I don’t really have a preference one way or another, but I tend to stay clean shaven more often than not. However, I did grow one for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[123,122,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-2a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","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=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}