I decided to get a little April Foolish this past April 1st. I normally wake the kids up at 7. Instead, I ran\u00a0into my youngest son’s room at 6:45.<\/p>\n
“Hurry!” I shouted. “It’s 7:45! We overslept. You have 5 minutes to get to the bus!”<\/p>\n
He jumped out of bed, looked at the clock, then looked at me.<\/p>\n
“It’s 7:45!” I said.<\/p>\n
“It’s 6:45” he growled.<\/p>\n
“April Fools!” I said.<\/p>\n
“Not funny.”<\/p>\n
“Well, since you’re up,” I said. “How about you make your bed?”<\/p>\n
The fight to have\u00a0them make their\u00a0beds in the mornings was lost long ago, but I haven’t given up entirely.<\/p>\n
“Really, Dad?” he said.<\/p>\n
“Really. Make your bed.”<\/p>\n
He did.<\/p>\n
That night,\u00a0as he was going to bed, he asked if I could go back to waking him up at seven am.<\/p>\n
“Let’s make a deal,” I said. “As long as you make your bed each morning, I’ll wake you up at 7 the next morning. If you miss it, though, I’m going to wake you up at 6:45, just to give you enough time.”<\/p>\n
He thought about that. “Okay,” he said, finally, “but you have to remind me to make my bed.”<\/p>\n
I grinned. “I can do that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For once, I think I’ve struck a good bargain with one of my kids. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-Ff","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557","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=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}