This past Halloween, one of the boys was a werewolf and the other was a zombie. Both costumes feature frightening detailed masks that pull over the head.<\/p>\n
Two nights ago, I set them up in the kitchen, one over the paper towel rack and the other over a water bottle. Together with the gloves and other bits of costume, I made the werewolf look like he was crawling off the top of the kitchen table. The zombie looked like he was climbing over the counter.<\/p>\n
My plan was to give the boys a scare when they got up in the morning. Instead, I had two appreciative boys waking me up.<\/p>\n
“Did you do that, Daddy? That looks really cool.”<\/p>\n
“I like the werewolf hand!”<\/p>\n
Sheesh. Undeterred, yesterday I set the masks up in the darker corners of their bedrooms, the places where the shadows stretch in the evenings, and nothing looks defined.<\/p>\n
This morning, the boys didn’t even mention the masks. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more.<\/p>\n
“So, did you see the werewolf?” I asked. “What about the zombie?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” first one boy shrugged, and then the other. “Wasn’t as good as in the kitchen,” my youngest said.<\/p>\n
“You weren’t scared?” I asked. “You didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and see the monsters?”<\/p>\n
“Nah.”<\/p>\n
Hmph.<\/p>\n
Now I’m faced with a quandry. Do I view this as a challenge or do I, as my loving wife suggested, stop trying to terrify my young children?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If someone had done this to me when I was a little guy, I would have been absolutely terrified. <\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-mJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","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=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}