This past Saturday, J took a day off. For those non-parents out there, this means that I had the kids all day and through their bed time. She had the day to go out and just relax.<\/p>\n
For me, a day alone with the kids means The Adventure Bag. A couple years ago (before N was born), I discovered that mom being busy was an excuse for us to go have an adventure. We’d pack a backpack and head to a theme park, or a zoo, or a hike, or some other such place of High Adventure. Being the big fan of tradition that I am, I set aside a backpack and named it The Adventure Bag. It’s tougher now, since there are two kids, but we still do it and have a great time. Whenever the kids see the adventure bag, they know we’re headed out for some serious fun. This eliminates any tears or upset they might have over Mom leaving.<\/p>\n
As you can imagine, Adventure Bag days are tiring for all of us. Saturday was no exception. We returned around 3 and N went straight to a nap. C, however, was determined to stay awake. We went outside and played with some of the neighbor kids.<\/p>\n
By the time dinner rolled around, we could barely keep our eyes open. We were sitting at the kitchen table just sort of staring at each other when I had an inspiration. It was movie time. <\/p>\n
I looked over at C and said “Mary Poppins?”<\/p>\n
He considered and then replied with “Popcorn?”<\/p>\n
That was a good idea, but I thought I could do better. “Corn Dog?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah!”<\/p>\n
He hopped down and ran to the couch. We finished the day eating corn dogs and popcorn, and watching Mary Poppins. N slept through to the morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This past Saturday, J took a day off. For those non-parents out there, this means that I had the kids all day and through their bed time. She had the day to go out and just relax. For me, a day alone with the kids means The Adventure Bag. A couple years ago (before N […]<\/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":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-the-kids"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8C7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33115","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=33115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}