Weirdly, my switch to working out of my home office has caused the boys to become more aware of my work instead of less. In retrospect, this makes sense. Even though I see them more often, me being home and working upstairs keeps me much more in their awareness than when I was at an office.<\/p>\n
The other day, I went down to greet them when they came home from school. We chatted a bit and had a snack – a great little break from my work day. Afterwards, I stood up to get back to work. “Great snack, guys! I’ve got to get back to work now.”<\/p>\n
“No! Come see the building I made!”<\/p>\n
“No! Watch my show!”<\/p>\n
“Sorry guys, I’ve got to get back to work. I really do. I’ll see you at dinner.”<\/p>\n
“Aw…”, the older said.<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” the four year old asked. “Do you like work?”<\/p>\n
“You know,” I said. “I do. I like my work. I like making games and web sites and writing… I’m lucky. I really do like my work. But I like playing with you guys too, so it’s hard to get back to work sometimes.”<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” he replied. “When I’m a grown-up, I’m going to have the mommy work!”<\/p>\n
Behind him, I saw his momma – who teaches at his school and was at her computer taking care of e-mails – stiffen. I smiled. “That’s a great idea, big guy. Get that momma to work. Workin’ mommas, that’s a great idea!”<\/p>\n
He smiled and gave me a thumbs up. “Yeah!”<\/p>\n
“Momma already works,” my wife interrupted firmly, rising from her chair. “She works hard. Just ’cause I’m not upstairs, that doesn’t mean I’m not -”<\/p>\n
The little guy looked back at her. His smile faded. He clearly did not understand what was going on.<\/p>\n
“Sorry momma,” I interrupted with a broad smile. “I’ve got to get back to work now. Have fun PLAYING with the kids!”<\/p>\n
Her eyebrows arched up to her hairline. She took a breath to respond – and then caught sight of her youngest son. She let the breath out through a smile. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s let daddy get back to work. We’ve got some playing to do.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah!” he shouted.<\/p>\n
Heh, heh, heh. I’m going to pay for that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Weirdly, my switch to working out of my home office has caused the boys to become more aware of my work instead of less. In retrospect, this makes sense. Even though I see them more often, me being home and working upstairs keeps me much more in their awareness than when I was at an 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":[122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","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=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}