Of our two boys, the older is truly the specialist in being bad. His little brother, however, is starting to come into his own. One night last week was a great example. J was off with her friends and I was flying solo with the kids. After dinner, I broke out the chocolate pudding for dessert.<\/p>\n
It was good stuff, made all the better by the smidgeon of whipped cream dolloped on top.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, I wiped everyone’s face and started clearing the dishes. I should have started with the pudding bowl. After my first trip to the sink, I came back to find N with his face and hands covered in chocolate. Before he was aware of my intentions, I darted to the counter, grabbed a wet-wipe (possibly the best invention ever), and then stepped back to clean him off. <\/p>\n
I should have grabbed two. After his hands were clean, the wipe was a mass of chocolatey brown goo.<\/p>\n
I looked at his innocent little face. He was smiling, but not, I thought, in a malicious way. It seemed to me more of a “mm…pudding.” smile. I said “stay right there” and stepped over to grab another wipe.<\/p>\n
Big mistake. As soon as I let go of him, he took off running to the den.<\/p>\n
I shouted “wait! stop!”, grabbed a wipe, and gave chase. Normally, of course, you’d grab the child first – but I’d already cleaned his hands. The only real chocolatey part of him was his face. What could he do with his face?<\/p>\n
When I came around the corner of the couch, he was standing on the other side of the ottoman, grinning at me. He was holding his hands over his head like a monkey. I smiled and said “come-here, you.”<\/p>\n
He smiled back – and smashed his face into the ottoman. His pudding covered face. On to our clean ottoman.<\/p>\n
As I lunged forward, he kept his face face down on the ottoman, laughing into the cushion.<\/p>\n
I had to lift him up off the ground to break contact between his face and the cushion – and then he buried his face into my shoulder, still laughing.<\/p>\n
There will come a reckoning, little man. There will come a reckoning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of our two boys, the older is truly the specialist in being bad. His little brother, however, is starting to come into his own. One night last week was a great example. J was off with her friends and I was flying solo with the kids. After dinner, I broke out the chocolate pudding 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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","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-2x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","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=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}