Family Trees are CONFUSING!

I took this picture today as we were leaving to go have lunch with friends, but I thought it would be funny to tell you all about a conversation Jonathan and I had with Katelynn a few weeks ago.  We were trying to explain who aunts and uncles were.  This is especially confusing for Katelynn because she only has uncles in our immediate family.  I wish I had blogged about it that day because we went in circles trying to come up with an easy way a 3-year old would understand and make the connection about who an aunt or uncle was and how you become an aunt/uncle.  The first issue was that when we said "aunt", she thought "ant" and told us we were being silly because ants were bugs.  I don't think we ever really got her to understand why a person and a bug could both have the same sounding word, but we just moved on from it.

My first explanation was that girls were aunts and boys were uncles.  She knows a girl from a boy so that was an easy start.  However, that made her start saying, "So Mommy is an aunt and Daddy is an uncle?"   We then explained that IF Uncle Dan, Uncle Jeremy, or Uncle Matt had a baby, then we would be an aunt and uncle.  Well, then she assumed she and Justin would be an aunt and uncle too.  We then tried explaining that her uncles were uncles because they were mommy and daddy's brothers just like Justin was her brother and that if they got married, the girls they married would be her aunts (and if they had a baby, that would be her cousin was mentioned too.)  She responded then with, "So Justin and I would be an aunt and uncle?"  When we told her then that mommy and daddy would be the aunt and uncle, she laughed and said, "You are a mom and dad!"  We did try one last time to explain it using her and Justin as the examples, and for a minute we thought we had it explained until she said, "So I would be the baby's mommy and Justin would be the baby's daddy."  That's probably about the time we gave up explaining it.

Honestly though, learning how each person becomes a grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, mom, dad, etc has got to be confusing for a 3-year old, and I really think explaining it to them is even more confusing!  One day she'll understand it all though and we can look back at this post in the blog and chuckle about it together!