Families

My Sister Annie and Her Boy, My Nephew, Kinlay Family. It boggles the mind. So this is my baby sister, who is 30 (she is 30 this year, I think, or is it 29?), and her little boy, Kinlay. The name’s a bit unusual, no? It was my father’s middle name, in the Scottish tradition where children take their mothers’ maiden names as their middle names. Helps keep track of who’s related to whom, I suppose.

My Dad only missed meeting the little fella by months, by less than a year. The fleetingness of life is a damned rip-off sometimes, isn’t it?

Apparently Kinlay’s quiet, calm, smiley, though he’s sleeping less and less as he becomes more aware of his surroundings. But his sunny disposition apparently remains in place.

I’m keeping this post to one picture, so you won’t see his daddy. Looks like this family might be moving to Nigeria for a few years, which is… it’s just weird. My family, it seems, is full of expatriates. Quebecoise Mum in Anglo Canada, father from Nyasaland that spent much of his adulthood in Canada; me in Korea; now Annie and Martin and little Kinlay in Nigeria. It leaes only my middle sister and her family in the place where they grew up. (My mother lives in the same place they do, but Mum didn’t grow up there.)

For those wondering, Lime and I aren’t planning on making any clan-bolstering contributions soon, but I did tell her that I’d like to live long enough to meet my own grandkids. Which is part of why I am trying to be healthier these days. Apparently, I must have officially lost weight. Lime says so, her mom says so, various students have commented thus. As soon as the sniffles and ache of this cold pass, I’ll be back at the gym. I usually feel worse if I exercise while sick, so I’m going to hold off till I feel mostly better. I think tomorrow’s a good possibility for the day I start hitting the gym again.

4 thoughts on “Families

  1. You sister is beauitful and the little one is so cute.

    I’ve been trying to explain my own family history to Koreans and they just don’t get it. Grandparents from Europe, I was born in Canada, grew up in NZ and live in Korea.

    Good luck on the losing weight thing. I found after a few weeks that going to the gym has become a habit, and the results followed afterwards.

  2. Thanks.

    Yeah, it’s funny how so many people not only expect to live and die within, say, 300 km of where they were born, but how unfathomable it is to have such mixed and world-spanning backgrounds.

    Thanks for the encouragement. I think results usually come in a burst for me, near the beginning, and then anything beyond that gets harder to sustain. But anyway, health is more important than weight… and I’ve done both before. I should’ve kept swimming, all these years, but I didn’t. Ah well… it’ll come.

  3. It’s a Scottish tradition? It was all over the South for ages.

    (Two of our kids have the middle names Randolph and Karling, which were each SOME female ancestress’s maiden name…. I’m glad my mom ended the family tradition of the first daughter getting the middle name Flournoy and gave me the saner Randolph.)

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