{"id":466,"date":"2008-06-16T14:07:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T14:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/06\/16\/lessons-unlearned\/"},"modified":"2008-06-16T14:07:40","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T14:07:40","slug":"lessons-unlearned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/06\/16\/lessons-unlearned\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Unlearned"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year ago, I left my office job to work from home. It’s a bit more stressful than working for someone else, but much more rewarding. Now I split my time now between designing games<\/a> and writing.<\/p>\n

The biggest challenge initially was getting the kids to leave me alone when I was in my “office”. Since we were forced to address that issue, we expanded the lesson to include recognizing when someone else is working and not interrupting.<\/p>\n

It has worked very well. With the kids out of school now, though, it’s a tougher lesson to stick to.<\/p>\n

Friday afternoon found me in my bedroom working on the laptop. N, my soon-to-be-four-year-old son , walked in to the room and stopped about a foot away from me.<\/p>\n

“Yes?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“Are you almost done?”<\/p>\n

“I can take a break soon, sure. Why?”<\/p>\n

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” and left.<\/p>\n

He came back a few minutes later. “Are you almost done?”<\/p>\n

“Just a couple more – ” I started.<\/p>\n

“minutes.” he finished for me.<\/p>\n

“Okay,” I laughed. “It really will be. Just let me finish this. I’ll be just – “<\/p>\n

He spread his hands “a couple more minutes!”<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

He left – and then came back a couple minutes later. “Has it been a couple minutes?”<\/p>\n

I shook my head. “I just have to get this last thing done. I’m going as fast as I can.”<\/p>\n

He turned to walk away, and then came back. “Daddy, I think it’s running out of juice.”<\/p>\n

“Juice?”<\/p>\n

He pointed to the computer. “I think it’s running out of juice.”<\/p>\n

I laughed. “No, I don’t think so. It’s plugged in.”<\/p>\n

“Daddy, what’s juice?”<\/p>\n

“It’s what some people call electricity. Can you say electricity?”<\/p>\n

He shook his head. “Are you done now?”<\/p>\n

“Yes,” I said, standing up and trying not to look back at the screen. “As done as I need to be.”<\/p>\n

“Hooray!”<\/p>\n

Hooray indeed. He took me out to the kitchen to show me the model plane they were building for Grampa, and we started our Father’s Day weekend a day early.<\/p>\n

There are some lessons I hope the little guys never learn, and I hope you all had as great a Father’s Day weekend as I did!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year ago, I left my office job to work from home. It’s a bit more stressful than working for someone else, but much more rewarding. Now I split my time now between designing games and writing. The biggest challenge initially was getting the kids to leave me alone when I was in my “office”. […]<\/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-466","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-7w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","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=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}