Last Saturday, I took the \u00a0boys down to Hollywood Studios for a back-to-school fling. The park was packed with people, but we know the parks pretty well, and are pretty good at navigating the crowds.<\/p>\n
After dinner, we stopped by the Honey I Shrunk the Audience playground. It’s a playground themed around the idea that people are smaller than bugs. There’s a giant anthill with a maze of tunnels for \u00a0kids to explore, a giant spiderweb to climb around, and a bunch of slides and play structures, all keeping to the theme.<\/p>\n
My oldest took my hand as we walked toward it.<\/p>\n
“You’re going to play with us, this time, right?”<\/p>\n
“I’d like to,” I said. “It just depends on how crowded it is.”<\/p>\n
When we got there, though, it was even more crowded than the rest of the park. \u00a0“I can’t, big guy. Look at all these kids. I can’t take their space.”<\/p>\n
“But other adults are!”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” I nodded. “But they’re all following little guys, just like I used to stick with you.”<\/p>\n
He looked really disappointed. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”<\/p>\n
“I’ll be fine.” I said. “You and your brother go explore. \u00a0Hopefully, next time it’ll be less crowded.”<\/p>\n
They charged off into the mass of kids and I settled back to wait.<\/p>\n
It’s weird. I always knew that they’d be leaving me behind for things like this, but it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t want to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sorry for the late post! It’s a mark of how crazy the schedule is these days, that I didn’t even realize yesterday was Monday. Today’s tale is a story of growing up – more so for me, I think, than them.<\/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":[118,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-sX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795","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=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}