Last week, my wife decided to surprise my kids with a trip to the beach to watch the sun rise over the ocean. She and I woke up ridiculously early, got dressed, and went to get the kids.<\/p>\n
“Wake up,” I said to my youngest. He groaned and stuffed his head under the pillow. I took it away from him. “”Hurry! Your mom’s taking you to the beach to see the sun rise, and if you don’t go quickly, you’ll miss it!”<\/p>\n
He jumped up started grabbing his swimming stuff.<\/p>\n
A few minutes later, I was pouring myself a glass of juice when both boys came out of their rooms.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to see the sun rise?” my youngest said.<\/p>\n
My wife glared at me. “Oh shoot!” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was a surprise.”<\/p>\n
“What’s the sun rise?” my oldest asked, yawning.<\/p>\n
The other three of us looked at each other, then his little brother started to answer.<\/p>\n
“Don’t!” I interrupted him sharply.<\/p>\n
“But -” he said.<\/p>\n
“No.” I said. “You’re not allowed to tell him. I messed up the surprise for you, but you can’t mess it up for him.”<\/p>\n
“But it’s the – ”<\/p>\n
“Shush!” I said again, more sharply. “Don’t say it.”<\/p>\n
He stared at me, outraged, then started to giggle. I had a tough time keeping a straight face, myself. After all, I was forbidding him from explaining what a sunrise was.<\/p>\n
“What?” his older brother said. “I don’t get it.”<\/p>\n
“Go have an adventure,” I said.<\/p>\n
And they did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his defense, none of us think too clearly when we’re woken up two hours earlier than usual.<\/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":[123,118,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-qu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642","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=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}