On Being Avuncular

Friday night, for the first time in my life, both my nieces spent the night. I was thrilled, and it went surprisingly well. If you're not an Uncle, I can only tell you that it was pleasant beyond understanding. I recommend everybody get themselves set up as an Uncle, though there might be some tricky genetic and legal maneuvers associated with becoming an Uncle without involving anybody else.

But as I approached the day of the night of the sleepover, I was conflicted. After all, the majority of my experience in dealing with small children had been watching Congressional committees.

Did I have the coping tools, the skills, the diplomatic tact? The uncanny ear of a parent, somehow able to distinguish between the common "Gimme that back!" and the more precipitous "If you stick that emergency flare in the wall socket again, I'm gonna tell!"

For Saturday, we already had a full day planned, so I would just need to cart my charges from Designated Spot A to Spot B at Time C, and be at Spots D & E -- soccer parks in 2 different time zones -- 10 minutes later and 15 minutes earlier. But Friday's agenda was left to me. So I did a little research.

One choice was (Somebody's) Fun Park. I checked it out. Oh good. Speeding karts, lasers and baseball bats. No way my reflexes (or my liability coverage limits) are up for that. I think we'll wait till the fun park adds the interactive "My First Combustible Science Experiment" booth and the ever-popular "Mr. Toad's Wild East L.A. Freeway Car Chase."

I recalled a place we've visited before, named Something-Euro-Sounding-Town, where the eager youngsters will at least learn some valuable life skills. You know...the addictive nature of gambling, the wildly variable personal fashion decisions that people will actually wear in public, the inevitability of disappointment, a renewed appreciation for buffet sneeze guards.

A friend advised that my nieces might be getting a bit old for "Town." Oh, come now. You're never too old to shell out roughly 65 bucks for a 14-cent malformed Malaysian plush duck. That's the kind of family-enriching enterprise that made America great, or last in the world, or whatever we are this week.

Earlier, I had alerted my work team of the weekend plans, and Friday afternoon I dashed to the grocery, to figure out what Niece Food looks like. What it looks like is this - miles of aisles, vistas of vibrant colors, a heaven of heat-n-serve. The cookie section alone was the size of New Jersey, but with more exits.

And according to the packaging, every single product has been voted "America's Most Bestest Favorite," recommended by 3-out-of-4 dentists, approved by 4-out-of-5 pediatricians, chosen by 3-out-of-2 very poor math teachers, adopted by NASA, is extremely good for you, and promotes a greener sort of non-animal-threatening, global-cooling, world peace. In the Juice Box acreage (which, from the cookie section, only required 2 bus transfers), there were some 27 million options. Apparently, every US child has their own marketing department.

Returning from the grocery, I discovered a lovely basket from my work team, full of extremely gender-specific gifts. Either I had nieces visiting shortly, or else I had become the unwitting recipient of someone else's prayers, and had become Aunt Barry, destined to flip from dreaming about Angelina to dreaming about Brad.

(And if it must be so, then it must be so. But it will have to be 'Aunt Barry,' just like that, just exactly, exactly like that. 'Aunt B,' I can't even bring myself to say.)

But it was just the one night. I was sure we would survive it. Honestly, I was more worried about their parents in the aftermath.

"But Uncle B doesn't care if we shoot arrows through the drywall!"

"But Uncle B lets us eat candle wax if we want to!"

"But Uncle B lets us go to Paris for lunch!"

By the way, for Friday night, we settled on pizza delivery and the movie "Madagascar." How could I lose? We stay in the house, eat bland food, introduce no sharp objects into the mix, and watch a cartoon starring non-existent talking animals who have irrational escapist fantasies.

At one point in this "Family Movie of the Year" winner, a Jack Bauer-style unit of martial-arts-practicing penguins take out an entire ship's crew, steal the ship, beach it in Antarctica, look around at this enormous mass of ice the size of a Juice Box aisle, and one non-com penguin says, "Is this gonna suck?"

One niece leaned to the other and whispered, "That's a bad word."

I blasted a quick email to my work team: If you don't hear from me by Tuesday, send out the brandy and hounds.