For the past week, I’ve been up in Maryland doing what I could to help out my sister. Without getting into the details, her husband suffered a series of medical mishaps that ended with him in the ICU with serious brain damage. My siblings and I flew to help out however we could.<\/p>\n
I explained all this to my kids by telling them that their uncle Ed was very sick, and I was going to help out. They understood this, and I thought all was well. I called home from MD each night to say goodnight to all of them.<\/p>\n
The second night, N (the three year old) interrupted me.<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” he said quietly. “Thanks for helping uncle Ed.”<\/p>\n
I was (amazingly enough) speechless. He sounded so sad when he said it that I didn’ t know how to react. I told him I was happy to do it, and he said the saddest goodnight I’d ever heard.<\/p>\n
I didn’t understand what was going on until I got back.<\/p>\n
When I arrived home late on Wednesday, J told me that the little guy had said to her “I hope that Daddy doesn’t catch what Uncle Ed has.” She had reassured him, of course, but he remained skeptical.<\/p>\n
I think it’s time for me to stay home for a little while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the past week, I’ve been up in Maryland doing what I could to help out my sister. Without getting into the details, her husband suffered a series of medical mishaps that ended with him in the ICU with serious brain damage. My siblings and I flew to help out however we could. I explained all […]<\/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":[123,122,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8DL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33217","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=33217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}