A little while back I walked in on my wife giving my seven year old a scolding. I hadn’t seen the actual infraction, but based on the lecture, it sounded like he’d been picking on his little brother again – nothing serious, but rather one of those cases where he’d ignored repeated requests to stop.<\/p>\n
He, on the other hand, had that blank sort of expression that seven-year olds are so good at, the one that says “I’m really trying\u00a0to look like I’m paying attention, but please hurry up so I can bet back to playing.”<\/p>\n
My wife stopped, as any sane adult would.\u00a0 “Are you even listening to me?” she asked.<\/p>\n
“Uh-huh.”<\/p>\n
“Why are you in trouble?”<\/p>\n
The big guy looked around for an answer, then went with the safe choice. “Cause I was being mean.”<\/p>\n
“What did you do?”<\/p>\n
He looked at his feet, ashamed. “I tackled him.”<\/p>\n
My wife looked completely baffled. “You what?”<\/p>\n
“He did,” his little brother chimed in. “He really did!”<\/p>\n
My son realized his mistake. Tackling is a big no-no in our house. It’s something that got out of hand for a while, and we’ve instituted a very clear zero tolerance policy. “No, no!” he said. “It wasn’t that. It was that I was, um…”<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of any lesser crime to confess.<\/p>\n
Luckily for him, my wife was nearly incapacitated with trying not to laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think we’ve all been through this experience before – that horrified moment of realizing we’ve just said the absolute last thing we wanted to say. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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-719","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-bB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","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=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}