Yesterday, when the kids were supposed to be cleaning their playroom, the seven-year old started picking on his younger brother. At first, it was minor stuff, nothing we needed to get involved in. As it escalated, though, our hand was forced.<\/p>\n
First came the warnings, then the more serious warnings, finally, the horrible judgement: “Okay, we warned you. Now you have to clean it up all by yourself.”<\/p>\n
The big guy collapsed under the terrible weight of justice. He rarely tantrums, but he started coming awfully close to that. We did what any good parent would do: we closed the door and went to the family room. He quieted down after a while, and we heard the sounds of cleaning.<\/p>\n
Then I watched his little brother walk over to the door and open it.<\/p>\n
“Oh,” the little guy said.<\/p>\n
“What?” his brother answered, still angry.<\/p>\n
“You missed the dragon hat. Don’t forget the dragon hat. It’s right there on the floor.”<\/p>\n
“AAAGGGHHH! \u00a0GET OUT! GET OUT RIGHT NOW!”<\/p>\n
The little guy walked back through the den, smiling.<\/p>\n
I probably should have said something to him, but all my energy was being spent on not laughing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They say revenged is a dish best served cold. When it comes to seven-year olds, I think “luke warm” is more effective.<\/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":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-bX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","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=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}