When it comes to bedtime, I’m the strict one in the family, the one who tries to enforce the kids’ bedtime.<\/p>\n
The kids, of course, want to stay up all night, and come up with all sorts of creative ways to stall.<\/p>\n
“But Dad, can’t I tell you about this new idea I had?”<\/p>\n
“But I’m so thirsty! I just need one more drink.”<\/p>\n
“You know, I was thinking. . .”<\/p>\n
“Can I tell you a bedtime story?”<\/p>\n
Most of these seem reasonable, when taken out of context. When viewed from the “it’s already an hour past your bedtime” viewpoint, however, all they are is frustrating.<\/p>\n
Last night, my oldest came up with a new one. He walked out of his bedroom with a wide grin on his face.<\/p>\n
“What are you doing?” I said. “It’s bedtime!”<\/p>\n
He smiled even wider and held out his hand.<\/p>\n
Gathering my breath for a truly prodigious roar, I moved closer.<\/p>\n
Then I saw what he held in his hand: a tooth. I looked again at his smile, and the little bloody hole where his tooth used to be.<\/p>\n
He chuckled.<\/p>\n
“You pulled your own tooth out?” I said.<\/p>\n
“I was just kind of wiggling it, and it came out.”<\/p>\n
“Okay,” I sighed. “To the bathroom. You’ve got to rinse and spit, really cold water.”<\/p>\n
“But it’s bedtime,” he said slyly.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve done some pretty impressive stalling in my time, but nothing comes close to this. 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-1978","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-stalling","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","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=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}