Saturday evening, the plague arrived.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t just your garden variety plague either, but the full package: sweats, shakes,\u00a0congestion, and a\u00a0surprising amount of ear pain.<\/p>\n
Since\u00a0my family clearly did not properly appreciate the magnitude of my suffering, I\u00a0was obliged to inform them, releasing carefully timed moans periodically throughout the day on Sunday.<\/p>\n
They did not elicit the proper amount of attention.<\/p>\n
This morning, I shuffled out of my bedroom to find my youngest son cheerfully making breakfast for the family. It was a wonderful gesture, an unasked-for gift for the rest of us.<\/p>\n
“Morning, Daddy!” he said cheerfully.<\/p>\n
“Morning,” I croaked.<\/p>\n
“How are you feeling today?”<\/p>\n
“I’m on Death’s Door,” I said, staggering slightly for effect.<\/p>\n
He smiled, eyes twinkling. “Knock, knock, knock!” he said loudly. “Special delivery!”<\/p>\n
I wrapped my robe more tightly around my disease-ridden frame and gave him my best dying glare.<\/p>\n
It didn’t work.\u00a0All he did was laugh harder as he\u00a0returned\u00a0to his\u00a0breakfast-making.<\/p>\n
There is no love in this world.<\/p>\n
It was, however, a very tasty breakfast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just to be clear, being on Death’s Door is not fun. It is, however, occasionally funny. 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":[122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2742","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-Ie","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2742","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=2742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}