The family split up this past Sunday. My wife and our oldest son were busy with a church function, while my youngest son and I headed to the beach to visit my folks. We didn’t get back together until bedtime.<\/p>\n
As I was tucking my oldest into bed, he said his stomach was hurting.<\/p>\n
“Really?” I said. “Where?”<\/p>\n
He pointed to the top middle of his stomach.<\/p>\n
“Hmm. I don’t know. Have you gone to the bathroom?”<\/p>\n
“I think it might be my appendix.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“But-”<\/p>\n
“You don’t want appendicitis,” I interrupted. “It’s super painful. Your brother was in the hospital for 8 days. And when I had it? Wow. Crazy pain.”<\/p>\n
He looked disappointed.\u00a0“Oh.”<\/p>\n
When I asked my wife, she said he’d been fine all day. She checked on him anyway, but agreed there was nothing to do about it.<\/p>\n
This morning, his brother looked bleary-eyed at me when I woke him up. “My stomach hurts.”<\/p>\n
I sighed. “I’d imagine. You had a lot of ice cream yesterday. Don’t worry. It’ll feel better.”<\/p>\n
“But it really hurts.”<\/p>\n
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with it. I’m so far behind at work, there’s no way you can miss school today.”<\/p>\n
I know, I know. I’m a cold, heartless daddy.<\/p>\n
“Oh.” He straightened up. “Okay.”<\/p>\n
“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll skip biking into school, just to be on the safe side.”<\/p>\n
The rest of the morning went smoothly. There were no complaints from either son – not during breakfast, not during our fifteen minute pickup basketball game, and not during the drive to school.<\/p>\n
I think it was a case of Monday-itis… but we’ll see what happens tomorrow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A kinder, gentler dad would probably be sitting at home watching movies with his two boys right now… 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":[118,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-tD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837","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=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}