{"id":1764,"date":"2012-11-23T19:31:05","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T00:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stories.daddytales.com\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2012-11-23T19:31:05","modified_gmt":"2012-11-24T00:31:05","slug":"surprise-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2012\/11\/23\/surprise-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The kids and I have been playing a lot of “If you had a” lately. It’s a game where one person asks “if you had a ___ what would it be?” Everyone answers, preferably with a story, and then we vote on our favorites [there’s more info here<\/a>]. The only problem is that the boys have gotten into the habit of always voting for me.<\/p>\n

It’s not because my stories are the best, but because they don’t want each other to win. If each of them votes for me, neither of them gets two votes.<\/p>\n

I’ve been trying to combat this problem by talking up their stories. Tonight, though, I tried a different approach.<\/p>\n

“If you had a 20 minute video,” my youngest son asked over dinner. “What would it be?”<\/p>\n

My oldest described a pretty funny cartoon. My youngest talked about an adventure with someone surviving in the wild.<\/p>\n

“20 minutes?” I said. “Easy. A video of your mom dancing.”<\/p>\n

They both looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but we were interrupted by the check arriving (we were at a restaurant), and the game was cut short.<\/p>\n

Later, as I was sitting alone with my youngest son by the beach, I asked him who he voted for.<\/p>\n

“You,” he said without a pause.<\/p>\n

“Really?” I asked. “You want to watch your mom dance for twenty minutes?”<\/p>\n

He looked at me blankly, then his cheeks turned pink and he started laughing. “No, No! Not that! I don’t vote for yours. I vote for anything but yours!”<\/p>\n

When his older brother joined us, I asked who he voted for.<\/p>\n

“You,” he said.<\/p>\n

His little brother and I burst out laughing. “Mom dancing?” I said.<\/p>\n

“No, no, no! Not that!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If you had a” can be a strange game, but rarely is it quite this strange. Enjoy!<\/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":[123,118,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-ss","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","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=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}