birthday party write up<\/a>.<\/p>\nOnce the kids figured out what to look for, it became the highlight of the party. I would shout alarm, and the excitement would instantly ramp up, as the kids went into a frenzy of searching for green badges.<\/p>\n
The second time I shouted Alarm, however, I noticed an oddity. Some of the kids stopped what they were doing and looked at their own badges before going on to find the bad guys. I didn’t worry about it, but the phenomenon spread. On the third alarm, there was a wave of kids inspecting their own badges before going on to look for the bad guys.<\/p>\n
It was weird, but I didn’t worry about it. The kids, after all, were having a great time, and that was the whole point.<\/p>\n
The next morning at breakfast, however, my youngest revealed the mystery.<\/p>\n
“Daddy, my favorite part was the alarm.”<\/p>\n
“Oh yeah? That was fun, wasn’t it?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah, but I’m glad my badge didn’t turn green.”<\/p>\n
Ah-ha! Mystery solved. I nodded seriously. “Me too.”<\/p>\n
“Cause then I would have been evil. I don’t want to be evil.”<\/p>\n
“No, me neither.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” he laughed. “That would be bad.”<\/p>\n
Yep. It sure would be. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The birthday party this past weekend was themed around the idea of having a comic book adventure. Everybody wore badges identifying them as Heroes, Sidekicks, or Innocent Bystanders. Periodically during the party, I would shout “alarm” to indicate that some of the people turned evil. They could spot the evildoers because their badges turned green. If […]<\/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":[123,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33278","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\/p6DpYi-8EK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33278","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=33278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}