Kenz, Kenzie, Kenzer. So many nicknames that all connotate to her cute innocence. She was always the youngest, and littlest nut of the band of cousins but it never caused her to shy away or back down from any ping pong war or air hockey game - she could always retaliate twice her size. Her rambunctious and uncontrollable nature as a young kid matured into her competitiveness and adventurousness as an adult. She went from painting all the cookies we’d eat after painting (as they weren’t pretty enough to make the Christmas day spread) to taking the prize for co-cookie of the year last year and the cookie of the year prior. Which, ironically, are the two years we’ve made Grammy choose a best & worst cookie of the year.
While it likely won’t be my fondest memory, Kenzie definitely loved to tell it and it’ll be one that I’ll always remember because of her fondness for it. For some reason, I got the rights to be the big cousin baby sitter (maybe because the last time Leah was there a puppy lost a nose?). However, I too was a punk, like Kenzer, and quickly got fed up with trying to chase her around the house to either put clothes on, or have her dinner (which was, by her choice, dinosaur egg oatmeal) because I wouldn’t let her have dessert until she finished her oatmeal. Clearly the oatmeal wasn’t sugary enough because she wanted those little Dibs ice cream snacks more than the oatmeal she made me cook. It’s worth noting that at this point in our lives, we didn’t share the passion of baking/cooking that we do now so that bowl of oatmeal was quite a bit of effort on my part. While I’d like to chalk it up to ingenuity, it probably had more selfish motives when I realized I could actually get her to sit still, with clothes on and let me watch cartoons if I gave her a Dib for every certain amount of time she’d remain calm. We ended up having an absolute blast watching TV, eating Dibs, and playing on the couch and trapeze bars in the basement until the parents came home.