Distracted as I’ve been lately, I still realized that my oldest son was skipping cross country practice this morning.<\/p>\n
I just didn’t know what why.<\/p>\n
As his brother and mom were flurrying around getting ready for cross country, he and I had a more leisurely morning – until his mom noticed.<\/p>\n
“What are you doing?” she said to him. “The whole reason you’re skipping cross country is so you can study for your tests.”<\/p>\n
He looked outraged they she would say such a thing. “I was<\/em> studying for my tests!”<\/p>\n “No,” I said. “No you weren’t.”<\/p>\n “Yes, I was.”<\/p>\n “Kiddo,” I said. “I’ve been here the whole time. You haven’t cracked a book.”<\/p>\n “I was<\/em> studying!” he insisted.<\/p>\n “No, you weren’t.”<\/p>\n “Yes, I was<\/em>!”<\/p>\n It was that last was that clicked the light bulb on. “This morning,” I said firmly, “I haven’t seen you study at all.”<\/p>\n “I know.” he said. “But I was<\/em>, earlier.”<\/p>\n “You mean, like during the ten minutes or so before I came out?”<\/p>\n “Exactly!”<\/p>\n “Get your backpack,” I said. “Now.”<\/p>\n Who knew the word “was” could be so open to interpretation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every once in a while, a parent and child have an honest misunderstanding. I’m pretty sure this was not one of those times. 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":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-clarity","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825","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=1825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}