My brother and his wife were here last night and brought me up to date on all the happenings with their kids. Tomorrow night my newest nephew will be here and I’m looking forward to babysitting. So this week I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy being an Uncle.
Having nieces and nephews is great because...
They are little/younger version of your own siblings and its cool watching them grown and take on characteristics of their parents. My sisters kids are spitting images of her and her husband, seeing them reminds of me of what it was like growing up with my sister. And I have lots of fond memories of my brothers and sister as we grew up.
You get to take pride in them, after all they are part of your family. I’ve got four fantastic nephews and four fantastic nieces. I love to brag to my colleagues and friends about them. I love to brag about how artistic they are, how they’ve won a scholarship, how they took a year to serve others, and about how fantastic it is to seem them love God see that expressed in all they do. I take great pride in them and their accomplishments!
Sometimes they do things for you. At a family wedding recently one of my nephews came to me and said he was going to take his cousins to the park as they were bored. What a kind and considerate young man and he was right my kids were bored with the adults who were busy visiting!
Sometimes you get to do things with them, and it’s fun! It’s fun being with my nieces and nephews, they are joy to be around. Each has a great sense of humour and makes me laugh, laughter is a good thing!
Sometimes you get to do things for them, and it feels great! I got to do two things recently, be involved in my nephew’s wedding and help send my niece to camp. It was an incredible honour to be involved in my nephews wedding and it was fun watching him and his bride go through the planning, preparing and execution of the day...definitely a wedding to remember. Britt and I also got to help our niece goto camp this summer and its been cool to see the pictures that Britt’s brother sent and hear the stories. I’d do anything I possibly could for my nieces and nephews and it was a privilege to do both of these things.
The give you reasons to celebrate! When they are born, you get to celebrate, when they reach milestones you get to celebrate (when your around...), and when they get married you get to celebrate. There’s just more reasons to get together as a family and celebrate. And when you live far apart like my family does these days, it just makes things more fun when there’s a big crowd and you are able to get together and celebrate.
So that’s why I like being an uncle. I’m not a very good uncle, but I sure do have great nieces and nephews.

We spent Saturday morning with Nanna and Poppa (not pictured) and then went over to Chuck E Cheese. Even though Calgary has a Chuck E Cheese we prefer to go to the Regina one as it isn't even half as busy as the Calgary one. 
Last night my son and I went and saw the Flames play the Oilers at the Saddledome. We sat in the Sportcheck section of the Saddledoame, which is located about as high up as you can go in the Saddledome. We were four rows from the top, any higher and we probably would have gotten altitude sickness.
Unfortunately the refs ruled that the puck never actually went in, but just came really close. So, we sat back down and the Oiler fans got up on their feet and cheered. In a stadium there of around 30,000 people, there were probably about 100 Oiler fans and believe me they were all standing and cheering.