Amanda and her Jeff?

I think little kids have a great radar about them. They are able to see goodness in people that, sometimes, we adults have a harder time seeing--or at least it takes us longer to get to the same conclusion.

When Amanda was little, three people showed up on her radar: Sheila (Mason's kindergarten teacher and now my good friend), Gordon (my oldest brother), and Jeff (Linda was only dating him at the time). I took notice right away with each because of how she acted with them. She was not very affectionate to people she didn't know. She was joined at my hip and she didn't even want anything to do with Robert until she was two. But with these three people, she was affectionate right from the start and excited to see them and loved to interact with them.

We met Jeff either one or two summers before he and Linda got married. Amanda immediately fell in love with him.

Every time I turned around, she was in his arms either giving him hugs and kisses, cuddling with him, or peacefully asleep.

At the end of our stay, she did not want to go home. But sadly enough, we had to get back in time for Mason to start school.

While we were at church, a couple of weeks later, she saw her Jeff in the hall. She cried out his name, ran to him, and jumped into his arms (luckily she was caught)! She was so happy and excited to see him. She couldn't believe that he was down here. Every Sunday she saw him, she would give him a hug and a kiss and beam from ear to ear. It lasted all that year until the following summer when we went up to Utah again. At the end of that summer when we came back home, she didn't even acknowledge her "California Jeff". As it turns out, her Jeff in California was not her Jeff at all. The Jeff down here was a guy whose first name, funny enough, was Jeff and to a three-year-old's perspective, looked an awful lot like her Jeff up in Utah. We thought it was the funniest case of mistaken identity.