Snapshots of my Family

My little sister was doing the laudry with my father one summer evening in the garage. She looked out the door and saw several of our elderly neighbors walking down the road. She turned to my father and said, "Daddy, do you know what that is?" "Well, that's a bunch of our elderly neighbors going for a walk," replied the serious patriarch. The witty gleam infected her eye (it does this periodically, you see). "No, Dad. That's the Antiques Roadshow!" (my poor father was then faced with the familiar scenario of trying to correct his disrespectful child while attempting to check his own laughter.)

My macho little brother (11 years old) walks up to my sister Deborah and says, "Deborah, I'm a man." She responds with a characteristic, "Um...I think you're mistaken. You're a boy, not a man." "I am too a man!" "You are too immature, selfish, small, and irresponsible to be a man..." she proceeds to enlighten the young rascal. He puffs out his chest and responds: "Yeah, well, I'm more of a man than you'll ever be!" Deborah laughs in his face "You're sure right about that, bud!"

Joseph stood up when he had finished his dinner one day and very graciously asked my father, "May I pweeez be exacuted?"

Our little philosopher, Daniel, walked up to my mother one day in his 2nd year and informed my mother, with the serious look of an intellectual behind his batting eyelashes, that "Boys make noise, Mom."

Daniel was running around in the commons area at church when he was three. My parents don't let us do this, so my father scooped him up under one arm, with his head sticking out back and his behind out front. The enraged boy flailed and cried out, "Unhand me!" (this is the point where my father glares at us and says "who taught him that!).