My oldest mowed the back lawn for the first time ever the other day. We have a surprisingly heavy lawn mower, so it was no small task. He tackled it with determination, though, leaning into the mower and pushing with his whole body.<\/p>\n
That night, as we were visiting with Nana and Grampa, we shared his victory with him.<\/p>\n
“You know that picture of the backyard?” Nana said. She was referring to a photo she has of the view out of the back window of the house I grew up in. Our yard was much, much bigger, probably ten times the size of the yard I have now, and the perspective of the photo makes it look even bigger.<\/p>\n
“Your dad used to mow all of that.”<\/p>\n
“Wow.” My oldest gave me one of those rare looks of respect that 11 year-olds reserve for only the most impressive of achievements.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I said. “I had a riding lawn mower.”<\/p>\n
“What!?!” He burst out laughing. “Da-ad!”<\/p>\n
Nana shook her head in dismay.<\/p>\n
Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have added that little detail. In fact, now that I’m remembering more clearly, I think it might have been snowing as I mowed that lawn…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writers spend a lot of time making sure they get the details right… and by “right”, I mean “not like this.”<\/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-2041","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\/p6DpYi-wV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","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=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}