{"id":333,"date":"2007-07-11T13:12:49","date_gmt":"2007-07-11T13:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/07\/11\/ah-nikita\/"},"modified":"2007-07-11T13:12:49","modified_gmt":"2007-07-11T13:12:49","slug":"ah-nikita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/07\/11\/ah-nikita\/","title":{"rendered":"Ah, Nikita"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We took the boys to a local playground (Central Winds Park) this past Sunday. It was loads of fun. There&#8217;s a play structure there that is literally three stories tall. It has bridges, climbing walls, ladders, slides&#8230; pretty much everything. In fact, two of the slides start at the top of the three story tower and wind themselves all the way down.<\/p>\n<p>Really, it&#8217;s amazing. <\/p>\n<p>When I&#8217;m at a playground with the boys, of course, I play with them. Once they start playing with the other kids, though, I back off. That&#8217;s what happened this time. There was a seven year old girl who wanted to get in on the pirates game that my two boys were playing.<\/p>\n<p>They had a great time, running all over the place, and playing. At one point, as everyone was taking a water break, I found myself sitting next to C (who is now almost five years old). I asked him her name.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Nikita,&#8221; he said. &#8220;She&#8217;s my friend.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s great.&#8221; I said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yeah, she wasn&#8217;t my friend. She was a stranger, but now she&#8217;s my friend.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I nodded, and tried out my smalltalk skills. &#8220;Yep. Nikita&#8217;s a pretty name. I don&#8217;t think we know anyone else named Nikita.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yeah, she&#8217;s really pretty, and her name&#8217;s Nikita, and when we grow up, when we grow up&#8230;&#8221; he was very excited now. &#8220;when we grow up, I&#8217;m gonna&#8230; I&#8217;m&nbsp;gonna&#8230;&#8221; He gave out a big sigh and said&nbsp;&#8221;Oh, never mind.&#8221; Then he ran off to play.<\/p>\n<p>I guess he likes older women.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been trying to figure out what he was going to say, and I have to admit it&#8217;s kind of driving me crazy. Unfortunately, you can finish a sentence that starts with &#8220;I&#8217;m gonna&#8230;&#8221; in so many different ways. I&#8217;ll probably never know.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I&#8217;m happy to report that his second significant romantic&nbsp;encounter went significantly better than&nbsp;his&nbsp;<a title=\"Wedding Kiss\" href=\"\/?p=94&#038;phpMyAdmin=y7-wyFW16QINBVwSxwbVWn-cg16\">first one<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We took the boys to a local playground (Central Winds Park) this past Sunday. It was loads of fun. There&#8217;s a play structure there that is literally three stories tall. It has bridges, climbing walls, ladders, slides&#8230; pretty much everything. In fact, two of the slides start at the top of the three story tower [&hellip;]<\/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-333","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-5n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","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=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}