I'd like to preface this by saying that I ordinarily don't think it's okay to laugh at kids, especially young kids, regardless of the reason. A little chuckle's fine, but you rish hurting their feelings and I wouldn't want to do that.

However sometimes it's impossible not to laugh. It's just important that you explain why it was funny afterwards so as not to do any permanent damage.

Now that THAT'S out of the way, get a load of this.

Sunday afternoon we celebrated several birthdays at the house, so the guests in attendance were my B-I-L and his family, his brother and family (plus another kid they were watching for the week) and their sister and her family, my M-I-L, my folks, and my wife's other sister and her family. The total was around 20 and, at the time that this happened, about half to two thirds of us were standing outside witnessing the event.

It seems that my B-I-L's nephew Mitch was scooting around on the latest fad to come back into popularity retro-style. He and his buddy Will (the guest) both had these on. If you've never seen them or haven't seen them in a while, they're now all over big stores (on the kids I mean), and it's quite amusing to see them all heel skating all over Sam's, WalMart, and other giant retailers.

Anyway, some of us were shooting some hoops and Will and Mitch were zooming around the driveway on their sketcher skates. Urchin 1.0 saw them and the rest should have been videotaped. Shame on me.

You see, one of them would run a couple of steps and then wheel around and skate away, and Lauren would run after them and, after running about 20 feet, jump stop and plant both feet with arms extending waiting for the skating fun to begin.

Only it didn't. See, she doesn't have any of these here fancy skatin' shoes.

So over and over again, Lauren would run full speed (usually right at Unk Todd's truck which I later tried to explain would be very dangerous if she had those shoes), jump stop, then stick her arms out to the sides sort of wobbly-ish, just waiting for the magic to happen.

We only let this go on for about 15 minutes before we were too sore from laughing and decided to tell her.

Actually, my 9-year-old nephew decided to tell her. We were too busy laughing.

So shoot me. I was laughing at my kid. But if you saw her doing this, you'd have been laughing too.

A lot. I promise.

p.s. No ninja visits the last two nights. Sophia slept for about 20 hours yesterday and was a little un-tired last night, but eventually went to sleep around 11:30, got up at 3:40am for a half bottle snack and was still sleeping when I left. Hopefully the wife won't have another morning where they're both up at the crack of snot wanting food, entertainment, etc.

Happy Tuesday ever-body.