Symmetry

Last night, we called my sister. Our nephew, the two-year-old, didn't really feel like coming to the computer to talk.

"Don't you want to come talk to aunt Robin?" said my sister.

[Off-screen: putter putter, busy busy, toys toys... general lack of enthusiasm.] He was kind of skyped out, evidently, having just been online with our cousin's kids.

Skyped-out, that is, until she asked, "Don't you want to talk to uncle M.?"

"Yeah! Uncle M!" And he ran over to the screen lickety-split.

***

Tonight, the Mister called his sister from his office in France (where he is working this week, yuck). Our nieces talked to him for a while, with lackluster interest, but kept asking about me.

So they called me on skype, and I just spent an amusing ten minutes with two pajama-clad little girls. They danced, and sang, and showed off their new English words, and showed me pictures.

***

What I'm saying is: it's funny that the American nephew is more interested in the Catalan uncle, and the Catalan nieces are more interested in the American aunt (at least in the 2-4 year old range; our 10-month-old nephew is just happy to smile at anyone on screen). And I wonder if it's because we're foreigners and have funny accents, or if the same thing would happen if we weren't foreigners, and it's just an effect of little girls looking up to big girls and little boys looking up to big boys?

I kind of suspect the latter, given the adoring way that the little guy speaks of his other uncles (my brothers). And in any case, all of the kids are wonderful and adorable and most of the time like to talk to both of us and make funny faces at us, and they always love to see us when we visit.

Being apart from our growing nieces and nephews is the hardest thing about living away from our families right now, but if there's a silver lining it's that we get to be the fun aunts and uncles who come for a visit swooping in on a plane.