Over New Year’s we had some friends over. They’re a couple that we’ve known for a long time, and we typically exchange “couple” gifts. This year, we made a mistake.<\/p>\n
They arrived at the house, we welcomed them in, and then handed each other our presents.<\/p>\n
C was very excited. He watched patiently as we opened them, even cheered us on with “Hooray! Presents!”<\/p>\n
Then we were done. He looked over at our guest, “Where’s mine?”<\/p>\n
Whoops. Now we had four adults looking at each other for hints as to what to do. We tried to explain that there weren’t any for him.<\/p>\n
He was clearly heartbroken. “But why?”<\/p>\n
Great question. Basically, because your parents are idiots and didn’t see this coming. We didn’t say that, though. We tried to explain that – well, we said something, but I’m not sure that even I followed the logic of it.<\/p>\n
“Why no presents for me?”<\/p>\n
Now, it had moved from embarrassing to a bit painful. The little guy was really sad. He wasn’t crying or manipulating or anything – just confused and sad.<\/p>\n
I have to admit that we fell back on that old adult trick of bustling off to the next thing: “Okay, Time to eat! Come on everyone! Let’s go eat! Uh, and play! Let’s go eat and play!”<\/p>\n
He followed along like a good little guy, so I held back from the group and snuck him a wrapped Christmas candy. It wasn’t a present, but at least he got to unwrap something and I knew that he loved that kind of candy. I handed it to him with a whispered “sorry, big guy”.<\/p>\n
He replied with his own whisper, “it’s okay, daddy. It’s okay.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over New Year’s we had some friends over. They’re a couple that we’ve known for a long time, and we typically exchange “couple” gifts. This year, we made a mistake. They arrived at the house, we welcomed them in, and then handed each other our presents. C was very excited. He watched patiently as we […]<\/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":[118,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8C5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33113","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=33113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}