{"id":66,"date":"2005-08-31T10:56:29","date_gmt":"2005-08-31T10:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2005\/08\/31\/life-is-so-difficult\/"},"modified":"2005-08-31T10:56:29","modified_gmt":"2005-08-31T10:56:29","slug":"life-is-so-difficult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2005\/08\/31\/life-is-so-difficult\/","title":{"rendered":"Life is So Difficult!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of N&#8217;s favorite things are these flashcards that J picked up somewhere. They are oversized &#8211; about as long and wide as a VCR tape &#8211; with a photo of an animal on one side. The other side has the name of the animal, and then lists a bunch of different activity ideas. The photos are very well done, showing the animal in its natural habitat with surprisingly vivid colors.<\/p>\n<p>N loves the pictures, and he&#8217;s working hard on learning the names of the animals. I&#8217;m not sure why we spend so much time teaching kids &quot;cows say moo&quot;, but we do. N has only a couple of the animals down, along with the sounds they make.<\/p>\n<p>A few days ago I was sitting in the den playing with C, when N came toddling over to me carrying a flashcard. &quot;Cah! Cah!&quot;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s his word for cow. Unfortunately, the flashcard had a picture of a chicken on it. I pointed to the chicken, and said very clearly &quot;No. Chicken. Chic-ken.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Usually, he repeats what I say when something like that happens, but this time he gave a weird little shrug and toddled away.<\/p>\n<p>He was back fairly soon, carrying another flashcard. &quot;Chi-tsen! Chi-tsen!&quot; <\/p>\n<p>I guessed he meant &quot;Chicken&quot;, but this flash card had a horse on it. I corrected him, he gave another of those shrugs and went back to the flashcards.<\/p>\n<p>He repeated this process several more times, going back and getting a new card each time: horse, turkey, mouse, duck, tiger, kangaroo. Each time, he got more and more frustrated.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, he came over with the chicken card again. &quot;Chi-tsen! Chi-tsen!&quot;<\/p>\n<p>I applauded, which caused C to applaud too.<\/p>\n<p>What else could N do? Flush with his victory, he moved on to making the animal sound: &quot;Kak, Kak, Kak.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>No N, that&#8217;s a duck.<\/p>\n<p>I could have sworn that he sighed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of N&#8217;s favorite things are these flashcards that J picked up somewhere. They are oversized &#8211; about as long and wide as a VCR tape &#8211; with a photo of an animal on one side. The other side has the name of the animal, and then lists a bunch of different activity ideas. The [&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":[123,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-14","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","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=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}