Last Sunday, the boys and I ended up in a restaurant over near Port Orange (called McKenna’s). We’d already had a full day, and we were all feeling tired and a little silly, too silly to focus on the menus.<\/p>\n
“Are you ready to order?” the waitress asked.<\/p>\n
“Sure,” I said.<\/p>\n
“No!” the boys said, opening\u00a0their menus. They were sitting across from me in the booth. “Not yet.”<\/p>\n
The waitress smiled. “Okay. I’ll give you a couple minutes.”<\/p>\n
McKenna’s has TV’s everywhere. It’s more of a sports pub than a restaurant. A soccer game was playing on some of the screens. Another one had motocross, which is basically\u00a0motorcyclists racing around a dirt track so covered with hills that they\u00a0spend as much time in the air as they do on the ground.<\/p>\n
The waitress returned. “Ready yet?”<\/p>\n
“Um,” the boys glanced at each other.<\/p>\n
She smiled again. “Okay. I’ll be back in a few.”<\/p>\n
As she walked away, I looked at the boys. “Focus,” I said, tapping the menus.<\/p>\n
“Okay, okay!”<\/p>\n
Cue a\u00a0phenomenal save by the goalie on the television screen, followed by a motorcyclist jumping so high that the camera shot just showed him and the sky, without any ground in sight.<\/p>\n
The waitress returned. This time she didn’t say anything, just put her hands on her hips and fixed the boys with a stare.<\/p>\n
“We’re sorry! We’re sorry! Just a few more minutes!”<\/p>\n
She\u00a0left.<\/p>\n
“No more distractions,”\u00a0my oldest said, examining\u00a0his menu.<\/p>\n
“Yeah.” His little brother leaned close over his menu, making a show of studying it. “Focus.”<\/p>\n
“Nothing can distract us now.”<\/p>\n
“That’s right. We’re deciding what we want to eat.”<\/p>\n
“Why doesn’t that girl have any clothes on?” I asked, looking behind them at a blank spot on the wall.<\/p>\n
Both boys’ heads whipped around to where I was looking. They glanced\u00a0back\u00a0at me, then at each other, then started laughing uncontrollably.<\/p>\n
“Focus,” I said, tapping the menu. “Focus!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is the one thing that will break the steely-eyed concentration of a pair of focused middle-school boys? I’ll give you one guess.<\/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":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-FZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603","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=2603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}