{"id":33277,"date":"2008-08-25T15:04:12","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/25\/can-i-fly\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T15:04:12","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:04:12","slug":"can-i-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/25\/can-i-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I Fly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

At my six year old’s birthday party, each child was issued a superhero badge with a super power on it (Super Strong, Super Fast, or Can Fly). The kids had a great time, playing games and pretending to be superheroes. Towards the end of the party, however, as we were watching Sky High, a little girl sitting next to me tapped me on the shoulder.<\/p>\n

“Mr. Pat,” she said quietly. “When can I fly? I tried and I could do it yet. When am I going to be able to fly?”<\/p>\n

She pointed to her “Can Fly” badge.<\/p>\n

Oof. I bent down close. “I’m sorry. It was all just pretend.”<\/p>\n

She closed her mouth and looked down.<\/p>\n

“But did you have a good time? Was it fun pretending to be a superhero? Did you like the games and the silly string and pinata?”<\/p>\n

She smiled, said ”yeah,” and turned back to watching the show.<\/p>\n

I have a feeling, however, that that smile was more for me than for her.<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in reading about the party, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At my six year old’s birthday party, each child was issued a superhero badge with a super power on it (Super Strong, Super Fast, or Can Fly). The kids had a great time, playing games and pretending to be superheroes. Towards the end of the party, however, as we were watching Sky High, a little girl […]<\/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":[123,119,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-funny","category-daddytales-sad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8EJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33277","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=33277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}