The boys and I were out throwing the football yesterday afternoon, playing rotating positions. It’s a straighforward game. One person throws, the other receives, and the third defends. Each configuration gets three downs to make a TD, and then you start over with people in different positions.<\/p>\n
We were having fun with it, but when some neighborhood kids showed up to play, I excused myself.<\/p>\n
“Why?” one said.<\/p>\n
“Work,” my youngest answered. Actually, that wasn’t why. I was just leaving because I thought I’d be in the way.<\/p>\n
“I hate work,” one of the kids said.<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” a third answered. “Why do dads have to work all the time, anyway?”<\/p>\n
Wow. Wake-up call heard.<\/p>\n
“I can work later,” I said, picking up the football. “What are the teams?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turns out there’s a whole lot of simmering upset just below the surface of the kids in my neighborhood. 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-2470","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-DQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470","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=2470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}