A few years back, right around the time that C was turning 1, I started calling him “little guy.” I’m not really sure why. It just sort of became a nickname that I used for him.<\/p>\n
Then his little brother was born, and I found myself with two “little guy”s. That seemed like a bad idea. I felt like a needed a different nickname each brother. So, after a bit of thought, I switched C over to “big guy” and N to “little man”. C was thrilled, N really wasn’t old enough to realize what was going on. The scheme worked out pretty well.<\/p>\n
The “little man”, however, just had his third birthday. Shortly afterwards, as I was driving him somewhere, he decided to make a change. I had just asked him a question, ending in “okay, little man?”<\/p>\n
“No! I’m not little. I’m big. I’m three!”<\/p>\n
That was fine with me. I didn’t mind switching. It could be our own little rite of passage for turning three. “Okay, big guy,” I said.<\/p>\n
“No! I’m big man, not big guy!”<\/p>\n
So that’s what I started trying to do. It’s hard, though. I’ve got three years of practice calling him “little man.” For the next two weeks, I found myself getting corrected almost constantly. It seems like every other time I talked to him, he corrected me with his “No! I’m not little. I’m big!”<\/p>\n
And, of course, there’s the strangeness of calling a three year old “big man.” For one thing, his older brother isn’t too keen on the new nickname. He’s turning four soon – and I know he’s going to want to make a change.<\/p>\n
How do I get myself into these messes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years back, right around the time that C was turning 1, I started calling him “little guy.” I’m not really sure why. It just sort of became a nickname that I used for him. Then his little brother was born, and I found myself with two “little guy”s. That seemed like a bad […]<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-5k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","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=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}