A lot of kids have imaginary friends. N, our two year old, for a while had an imaginary friend called “Kee-kee”. I hesitate to call Kee-kee an imaginary friend, however, because he was used primarily as an excuse. When N said something that got him in trouble, he’d say “No! I was talking to Kee-kee!”. If he had forgotten to pick up his toys, “No! Kee-kee was playing with them!”<\/p>\n
Though cute, this clever strategy didn’t get him very far – not with me, at any rate.<\/p>\n
Recently, he’s hit on a new imaginary construct. He remembers when he was a daddy and when he had two boys. We’ll be sitting at dinner, and he’ll say something like “when I was a daddy, I had to go to work. And my boys had to stay home. And, and, it was very sad.”<\/p>\n
He has come up with all sorts of things that he used to do when he was a daddy.<\/p>\n
The other day, however, he finally crossed the line. Just to set the stage, this was part of another food battle. He was refusing to eat his dinner again…<\/p>\n
“When I was a daddy, I told my boys…”<\/p>\n
“Your boys?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Yep. My boys. I told them they didn’t have to eat their dinner.”<\/p>\n
“Oh yeah?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah. I said, ‘It’s okay. you’re not hungry. It’s okay’.” And he nodded very sympathetically – as if he were empathising with his two un-hungry boys.<\/p>\n
What do you say to that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of kids have imaginary friends. N, our two year old, for a while had an imaginary friend called “Kee-kee”. I hesitate to call Kee-kee an imaginary friend, however, because he was used primarily as an excuse. When N said something that got him in trouble, he’d say “No! I was talking to Kee-kee!”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-4M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","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=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}