whose your favorite aunt?

Where did this phrase come from?  We are up to the magic number of seven children between the four DeMarse sisters.  We torture each other's kids with this stressful question...they are learning.  Just answer with the name of the Aunt that is asking...duh.  Let me tell you where this phrase came from.

Luke was the first.  Born to me (oh...how lucky I am).  Luke is the first so he had a very spoiled life early on.  Spoiled rotten by my sisters, cuddled, coddled, dressed up, redressed up, that poor child.  I would develop rolls of pictures only to find that Jaime had taken a picture of Luke as a baby with a sign next to his head that looked like a thought cloud that said "I love my Aunt Jaime!"...but this is NOT where the phrase came from.

My sisters realized early on how fun it would be to get back at each other if Luke would say that one was the favorite over the other.  Tracy started this.  She watched Luke a lot in his early years, when he was beginning to form words that were understandable she would spend hours upon hours training him.  She would just repeat over and over "Whose your favorite Aunt?  Aunt Tracy!  Whose your favorite Aunt?  Aunt Tracy!".  He would suck on his hands, listening to her...saying nothing.  She was relentless.

As a baby, Luke slept with me every night.  I feared he would stop breathing, even when he was 2...then 3.... I would sleep with a constant awareness to his chest rising and falling.  When Luke started speaking...it was the end of all quiet.  Before this...he didn't talk much at all.  Matter of fact, my earliest memories of Luke talking happened on a quiet night at two in the morning.  I woke to find Luke sitting up in bed chanting...at first it was hard to understand...and then...I realized the chant was almost zen like.  He was rocking back and forth whispering in his tiny baby voice "Whose your favorite Aunt?  Aunt Tracy!  Whose your favorite Aunt?  Aunt Tracy!  Whose your favorite Aunt?  Aunt Tracy!...", he was a child possessed.  It took me an hour to get him to stop and go back to sleep.  I thought of a zillion ways to kill Tracy!  Or...I could hold on to this and wait until Tracy had kids herself one day.  She did...and the competition was on.  It goes on and on...with every child that is born, it is the tradition when you first hold the baby in your arms to say "Whose your favorite Aunt?"