Every once in a while, particularly when I don’t have any school or speaking engagements coming up, I shave off the beard. I actually prefer being clean-shaven, but my wife and kids all prefer me bearded, so that’s become my default look.<\/p>\n
For me, the best part of having a beard is when I shave it off. That’s when I can try all sorts of funky hair patterns.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, just before dinner, I shaved my chin. This left a swath of hair that went from my sideburns, down my jawline, and up and over my top lip.<\/p>\n
As I sat down to eat, the family reacted with varying degrees of shock and horror.<\/p>\n
“Okay, okay.” I went back to the bathroom, fired up the electric shaver, and shaved just the middle portion of my top lip.<\/p>\n
“No,” my oldest son said upon my return. “You’re not going out of this house like that.”<\/p>\n
At this pronouncement, my wife laughed so hard, I thought she was going to hurt herself. I left the table and shaved in some vertical stripes.<\/p>\n
“It’s my tiger look,” I said when I returned.<\/p>\n
“That’s not a tiger!” my oldest shouted. “That’s terrible!”<\/p>\n
“I know what you’re doing,” my youngest son said as I left to complete the shaving process.<\/p>\n
“You’re just doing it so we won’t mind,” he continued when I returned. “You show us the bad looks, so we’ll be happy that you shaved.”<\/p>\n
“Na-ah,” I said, sitting down.<\/p>\n
“But we still like the beard better,” he finished.<\/p>\n
I scooped up a huge amount of broccoli and dumped it on his plate. “Eat your veggies.”<\/p>\n
He was so outraged, he could barely speak. “What? No!”<\/p>\n
“Sometimes,” I said. “It’s better to keep quiet. Now eat your veggies.”<\/p>\n
“Mo-om!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’d like to say that she made him eat all his veggies, but she didn’t. 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-2237","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-A5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","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=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}