Unknown Uncle

Here's one I'll be telling on Laura for years to come. This past weekend, while at the rehearsal dinner for Mark and Tamra's wedding, I had an interesting conversation with my niece, Laura. She is Roger and Beth's three-year-old daughter. I saw her sitting quietly eating her chocolate cake, so I knelt down and said hello. She greeted me warmly and smiled a fudge-filled grin at me. "What are you eating?" I asked.

"Cake." she said matter-of-factly.

"Oh, I see that now. It looks yummy." I then noticed a small pile of eschewed tomatoes beside her plate and asked, "What about these? Are they yummy, too?"

"No," was her reply, "I don't wike tomatoes, so I picked-ed them off!"

I laughed at her cute little voice and then I tried to convince her to put them on her cake and various other silly suggestions. We had a few laughs and then I decided to quiz her on a few things, hoping to get a funny response. Friggs was sitting across from her, but with all the commotion, he wasn't paying us any attention (he had his own piece of cake, too.) I pointed to him and asked Laura, "Who is that?"

"That's Seth!" she said as if I was stupid.

I asked her about a few other people, which she anwered correctly. Then I asked her, "Who am I?"

She was clearly stumped for a second and then declared, "I don't know," and returned to eating her dessert.

I laughed and said, "I'm your Uncle Kyle. Don't you remember me at Grammy's house last Christmas and again just a few weeks ago?"

"I've never seen you before!" she announced with indignance. Of course, we all got a kick out of that and Beth explained that I was Aunt Kimmie's husband and Seth's dad. I do think she remembered her uncle then. Kimberly took a picture to remember the event and I vowed to make myself more memorable in the future. As a side note, Laura is pretty precocious and is known for such statements. In fact, while we were at Chuck and Marilyn's in February, I had to get on to her for something, I don't remember what now, but whatever it was, she stomped off and said, "Fine! Now I'm not going to be nice!"