I think the first time we heard it was during a scary(ish) episode of The Backyardigans. N (who was three at the time) climbed into my lap and grabbed my shoulder. “That was Yikes!”<\/p>\n
“Yikes?”<\/p>\n
He nodded “Uh-uh.” He held his hands out for emphasis. “That was yikes!”<\/p>\n
That was several months ago. Ever since then he’s used “yikes” as a synonym for scary. Two weekends ago, he started adding modifiers. He and I were on a trip to Animal Kingdom at the time, and we had just ridden on the raft ride there.<\/p>\n
He had started crying the moment the ride started and didn’t stop until well after it was over. We sat down on a bench to talk it out.<\/p>\n
“You wanted to go on the raft ride!”<\/p>\n
He sniffled. “But it was really yikes!”<\/p>\n
“Really yikes?”<\/p>\n
“Really, really yikes!”<\/p>\n
“Okay. Well, I’m sorry we went on it.”<\/p>\n
He stopped crying. “Maybe when I’m ten, okay? Maybe when I’m ten.”<\/p>\n
“Fair enough.” I pointed to the big roller coaster towering over us – the one that he’s way too short to go on – “How about that one?”<\/p>\n
He looked at it and pushed away from me, eyes wide. “That’s surely Yikes!”<\/p>\n
I lauged. “Surely.”<\/p>\n
We went to see the tigers, which, by the way, are also “yikes” – just not too much so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think the first time we heard it was during a scary(ish) episode of The Backyardigans. N (who was three at the time) climbed into my lap and grabbed my shoulder. “That was Yikes!” “Yikes?” He nodded “Uh-uh.” He held his hands out for emphasis. “That was yikes!” That was several months ago. Ever since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-yikes","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268","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=33268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}