First I’d like to say some honorable mentions that didn’t quite make the top 10. There was the day the world didn’t end, but who really expected that to happen, the day congress declared pizza a vegetable which made my diet considerably more healthy, and the day I got hit by a car on my bike just to bounce off the car and on the cement a few times unharmed (not really a great day until considering I was completely fine). All in all it was a great year and a top 20 would have been easy but I didn’t have time for it.
So after everything happening this year here we are at #1. To me this was unexpected but always wanted and took the top spot as soon as I heard the news.
Sometime around June of 2013 I am going to be…….. AN UNCLE!!!
Excuse me to take a few moments of excitement here but it’s the most amazing, potential packed, exciting, loving, scary, nerve racking, thought provoking and inspiring thing which has happened to me in a long time. And I’m just the uncle. I can’t imagine how my brother Tyler and his wife Kerri are feeling.
It’s weird for me because I’m the youngest of three brothers and of all my cousins who were around growing up. I’ve never had someone to look at as younger. A person I am a close relative of to take care of, buy small clothes for, send a toy, teach something to, pick up in the air and give them the love you can give to a kid, or teen or young adult. But now I will. And I’m so pumped!
If things continue as they are I’m probably not going to live near him/her (him/her is also exciting to think about!!!). So I’ll be the uncle who lives in some place foreign to them who they get to go on a plane and fly and visit for a week to stay up late at his house and go on adventures with to be slightly or wholly irresponsible. I’ll get to the privilege to have fun with the kid and check in on life when them. Send them abstract gifts and clothes which don’t fit quite right or aren’t completely in style at the time (along with a check of course to make up for whatever shortcomings I may have in appropriate gift giving).
I think about my Uncle’s Eddy, Fred, Bob, Terry, and Randy. They were all sweet. Uncle Eddy is the crazy one always good for fun. Uncle Fred is a man I’ll always look up to as what a man should be in how he treated his wife and me and others. Uncle Bob is a solid family man established in his community. Uncle Terry, the one I looked up to the most as a child, is a strong and silent man except for the stories which he tells of being a pilot who in Vietnam, commercially and then privately. Uncle Randy is tall and quiet but always enthused and asking questions about my life. I like to think I’ll take the good of what I’ve seen of them and try to be that.
Whatever it is about it I’m overcome with it all. I’ll do whatever I can to be good once this kid comes along and it’ll be another reminder in my life to grow up to be someone worth visiting and having a relationship with on any level. So to my #1, niece or nephew, you’ve got one excited uncle (and another uncle and aunt and grandma and grandpa and many more) waiting for you. You don’t know it yet but you are already being celebrated and will know it from the second you come into the world.
I am guessing I already know my #1 of 2013 as well. See you in June.
Just adding a little Rieth to the family!
I AM PART 