The boys and I always do a camping trip on the just before school starts. This year, as we were discussing just where our adventure should take us, I discovered that the oldest had a different plan.<\/p>\n
“The Fun Spot,” he said. “Let’s go there.”<\/p>\n
For those of you who don’t know Florida, the Fun Spot is basically a permanent carnival type thing, with go-carts, bumper boats, a ferris wheel and \u00a0so on. Not the sort of end of summer adventure I was hoping for. “No,” I said. “Let’s stick to camping.”<\/p>\n
“But maybe we could camp next to it,” he said. “You know. There must be a field or something.”<\/p>\n
“I don’t think so. People get kind of upset when you do that.”<\/p>\n
“Maybe it’s on the way<\/em> to our camp site.”<\/p>\n “Why do you want to go to the Fun Spot, anyway?” I asked. “You’ve never been there.”<\/p>\n “Cause it’s fun,” he said, “and it’s, um, a spot.”<\/p>\n His brother and I started laughing.<\/p>\n “It looks really fun on the commercials,” he said. “Besides, they couldn’t call it the Fun Spot if it wasn’t a fun spot.”<\/p>\n “Yeah,” I said, “but it could be a fun spot surrounded by acres of sadness. One little shining bit of joy in a wilderness of desperate depression.”<\/p>\n The two boys looked at each other, then at me, then burst out laughing. “Da-ad,” my oldest said. “Come on! You know it’s not like that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In case you ever thought to yourself “that kind of marketing can’t possibly work,” my children are here to tell you it can.<\/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":[123,118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-qP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663","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=1663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}