3 People

My daughter Nia is an enormous part of my life. As the first child she ushered in the era of my fatherhood. She was a whopping 9lbs 5oz at birth. Now she is nearly four feet tall. She has reddish black hair like mine and Shirley Temple curls inherited from her mother. She is almost the perfect combination of my wife and I. She has that caramel skin tone that I can not achieve even with a good tan. Right now she is missing one of her front teeth. At five years old she has a very large imagination. Not long ago she told me about a dream where a mermaid gave her a kiss on the cheek and she turned into a star that shot across the night sky. She has become adept at making up fantastical stories. Being a big sister is exciting for her. She loves to play with her little brothers and protect them. Her personality is best described as bubbly. Nia is very good at brightening up anyone's day.

I never planned on getting married until I was 36. Not long ago I was contemplating joining the EOD or the experimental parachute unit. EOD stands for Explosive Ordinance Disposal. I would have been in an EODMU or Mobile Unit that does a lot more than just disarm floating mines. The experimental parachute unit can be summed up like this: take a new parachute, screw with it, then jump with it and see what happens. One of the jobs in the unit is called the chaser, you jump behind the guy with the screwed up parachute and if he fails to deploy his reserve, you chase him down and catch him so you can pull your chute and save his life. That was the job I wanted. My wife changed all of those plans. They evaporated and I am probably still alive because of it. She is taller than most of the women in my family, which is not hard to do. She has dark curly hair and dark skin. Her quick wit and her strong sense of individuality are what attracted me to her. Though I have to be honest and say that she made the first move. Her confidence was refreshing and has carried us through our lives together. I can only admire her for carrying our children around for nine months. Nia was a big baby, but the twin boys were a lot more weight at 7lbs 4oz and 6lbs 7oz plus all the other stuff that goes with it. I can not imagine what my life would be like now if I had not met Pearl.

My uncle Gary is my favorite uncle. He is kind of the prankster of the family. To this day he is not allowed to be alone around my mom's pies because he purloined the center of my dad's favorite pumpkin pie. My uncle took the center of every pie but it was the pumpkin that was the problem. He always seemed fearless, like the time he asked my catholic grandmother (his mother) “How do you get a priest to sleep with a nun?”, a joke I am not going to finish. Ever since I can remember he has always had a mustache. The one time he shaved it off I almost didn't recognize him. My uncle is great except when it comes to watching movies. Gary is the person who will pick a movie apart for all of the movies foibles. This is something my brother has told me I have picked up. I also picked up his knack for computers. When I was younger my uncle would build me a computer and then guess how long it would take me to break it. I would purposefully see how big a drawing in AutoCAD I could create before it made the computer crash. I broke all but one of his computers.