My wife’s out of town on my birthday this year, so she conspired with the kids to have them make me a birthday breakfast. As we were eating, they dialed her on the phone.<\/p>\n
“Happy Birthday,” she answered. “Do you have my present?”<\/p>\n
“I’ve got one here from each of the kids,” I said. “But . . .”<\/p>\n
“What?” She said over the speaker phone. \u00a0“Where’s mine?”<\/p>\n
After a brief conference as to what had happened to hers, the boys tracked it down.<\/p>\n
“Thanks!” I flipped it over to read out loud a note written in Sharpy on its top. “Have a fantastic birthday! Sorry I couldn’t be there, honey!”<\/p>\n
“Okay,” my wife said. “So I didn’t get you a card. Sheesh!”<\/p>\n
“No, that’s what it says.” I noticed the kids looking rather sheepish. “Ah. I think it was added for you. It’s nice.”<\/p>\n
She was laughing. “I thought you were teasing me for not getting a card.”<\/p>\n
“No, no. This is cool. . . Honey.”<\/p>\n
That’s not something we call each other. She laughed even harder. “Just open it!”<\/p>\n
I tore into it, and pulled out a box of scone mix. “Scone mix?” I said. “Sweet! I’ll have to make them when you’re back.”<\/p>\n
“Scones? What are you talking about? Never mind. There’s more!”<\/p>\n
I pulled out another box of scone mix. “More scones.” I couldn’t stop myself from chuckling. “Great. We can make them when we make the other ones.” I pulled out a third box. “Hey, look. . . Scones!”<\/p>\n
By now, she was laughing too hard to speak coherently.<\/p>\n
“. . . and a bag of licorice.” I finished.<\/p>\n
“Those aren’t for you!”<\/p>\n
The boys, who had been looking confused, now looked alarmed.<\/p>\n
“Oh,” I said. “Can I have them, anyway?”<\/p>\n
“No!” she said. “Boys, go to my room, and – ”<\/p>\n
“But, Momma,” they interrupted. “Those were in the bag.”<\/p>\n
“Wrong bag.”<\/p>\n
She directed them to the proper bag, and they returned with a new jeans jacket, which is, I gotta say, super cool.<\/p>\n
. . . but I’m still keeping the scones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When conspiring with children, it is important to be extremely clear in your communications. . . or not. Actually, not. It’s more fun that way. 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":[123,118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-ym","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130","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=2130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}