The other day I found myself sitting by the train table while N was playing with the trains. It was just the two of us, and he was alternating between playing trains and making me dinner.<\/p>\n
He loves to “cook” for me – laying out little plastic plates and describing what’s on each one.<\/p>\n
This time, however, he got a little sidetracked. After rummaging around in the box of plastic kitchen stuff, he came out with a large blue plastic fish in one hand and a little red plastic ladybug in the other. He looked at them for a minute, as if surprised to see that he was holding them. Then the ladybug bit the fish.<\/p>\n
He laughed and made it happen again.<\/p>\n
The second time, however, something went wrong. Suddenly, my little two year old became very serious. He carried the two toys over to me. “Daddy, will you talk with him?”<\/p>\n
I was as confused as you are now. “Why?”<\/p>\n
“He was eating his eye. That’s mean!”<\/p>\n
“Okay.” I talked very seriously to the ladybug, explaining that eating eyes is not a nice thing at all. <\/p>\n
After I was finished, he held the lady bug up to the fish and said “Can I eat your eye? Is that okay?”<\/p>\n
Then he held up the fish. “Mmmm… Okay!”<\/p>\n
…and he wandered off watching the ladybug eat the fish’s eye. <\/p>\n
I have to admit I was a little disgruntled. If I’d known the two of them were going to be able to work it out, I wouldn’t have wasted such a great speech on the dangers of eating eyes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day I found myself sitting by the train table while N was playing with the trains. It was just the two of us, and he was alternating between playing trains and making me dinner. He loves to “cook” for me – laying out little plastic plates and describing what’s on each one. This time, […]<\/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":[122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","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-5g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","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=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}