During the school year, I am the breakfast guy. I get the kids up, help them get ready for the day, and make sure we all sit down to breakfast together. I like starting the day together, even if it does mean getting up half an hour earlier.<\/p>\n
My wife either sleeps in or hurries off to work, depending on her schedule, so it’s usually just the boys and me at breakfast.<\/p>\n
During the summer, the boys don’t have to get up, so it’s harder for me to enforce my breakfast policy. I was doing it, anyway, because that’s just the kind of dad I am.<\/p>\n
Then my wife intervened with parental observations like “they need their sleep” and “if they sleep in, I can sleep in.”<\/p>\n
And so started a period I affectionately call the dark mornings.<\/p>\n
During dark mornings, I leave all the lights off for my morning routine. I go upstairs to my office and work for a bit, then return\u00a0downstairs for\u00a0a solitary breakfast. I poke my head in each bedroom to say good morning and goodbye, and then I drive\u00a0to work.<\/p>\n
I’m not a big fan of the dark mornings.<\/p>\n
Last night, as I was putting my youngest to bed, he asked me a question.<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” he said. “How early would I have to get up to have breakfast with you?”<\/p>\n
“Six forty five,” I said. “Why?”<\/p>\n
“Cause I wanna have breakfast with you.”<\/p>\n
I woke him up this morning at 6:45. We played Magic the Gathering in the family room as we ate our Peanut Butter Crunch. When it was time for me to leave, we shared a secret handshake and he headed back to bed.<\/p>\n
I love breakfast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Family breakfast… Worth waking up for?<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-G1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","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=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}