One evening during these past holidays we had a few friends over. Among them was a little girl who is just about the same age as C. They played together pretty well, with N trailing along after them, while the adults mingled, chatted, and watched a little football.<\/p>\n
Eventually, however, things broke down. The little guy came running to the table of adults where I was sitting. He was crying. We asked what was wrong.<\/p>\n
“She won’t marry me!” he wailed.<\/p>\n
“Um, what?”<\/p>\n
“She won’t” – snuffle – “marry me! I said we were going to” – snuffle, snuffle – ”get married, and she said no! She doesn’t want to marry me!” He resumed his crying.<\/p>\n
Understandably, there was a bit of chuckling around the table. I called him over for a little quiet talk. “Listen, big guy. You don’t have to give up, you just have to be a little more subtle. Wait a bit. Get her to want to marry you before you ask her again.”<\/p>\n
He looked at me, wide-eyed. I think he expected a lecture and not a “this is how you do it” sort of speech. Then he nodded. “Okay, daddy. Okay.”<\/p>\n
And off he ran. A short while later, he came out of his room, dragging a big blanket. “Hey! Want to build a castle? Hey everyone, want to build a castle?”<\/p>\n
We had a brief huddle and decided that since no one was using the couches anyway, sure, we could build a castle. J and I took the blanket and stretched it between the couch and the ottoman, making a blanket fort. Or castle, as the case may be.<\/p>\n
As soon as it was done, he clambered inside. After inspecting it a bit, he climbed back out and ran to find his friend. “Hey, want to come in the castle with me?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah!” She said.<\/p>\n
He stopped her. “It’s a king’s castle!”<\/p>\n
“Yeah!” She said.<\/p>\n
They climbed inside. I was standing at the corner of the castle while all this was going on, trying to pile pillows on the edge of the blanket to keep it from falling. So I was close enough to hear when he whispered to her inside the castle.<\/p>\n
“Wanna marry me?” he whispered.<\/p>\n
“NO!”<\/p>\n
“Awww…. man!”<\/p>\n
Good try, little guy. Good try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One evening during these past holidays we had a few friends over. Among them was a little girl who is just about the same age as C. They played together pretty well, with N trailing along after them, while the adults mingled, chatted, and watched a little football. Eventually, however, things broke down. The little […]<\/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":[123,118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8Cv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33139","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=33139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}