After dinner a couple of weeks ago, the first night of the family reunion in Boise, my adorable three-year-old niece walked up to me and said, matter-of-factly, “That’s a big tummy.” “It sure is,” I responded, giving it a few loving pats. She thought it was pretty funny how the belly keeps shaking briefly after you hit it, like a non-exaggerated version of Homer Simpson, whose fat kept jiggling indefinitely in one episode:

Doctor Hibbert: Homer, this is a new body fat analysis test. What we’re going to do is jiggle the fat and measure how long it takes to stop.

(long pause, as the fat jiggles and jiggles and jiggles . . .)

Homer: Woo hoo! Look at that blubber fly!

Doctor Hibbert: (activating intercom) Nurse, cancel my one o’clock.

The next day, her dad (my brother-in-law, who is one of the skinniest people I know) overheard her singing to herself in the car: “Daddy’s a big boy, like Eric.”

The day after that, I was hanging out at my brother-in-law’s sister’s house, and her five-year-old son sat down next to me on the couch to catch some Rolie Polie Olie — at a part that he found particularly funny, he reached over, rubbed my belly, looked up and me and said, “That’s funny!”

Maybe it’s partly the beard, and I remind kids of Santa Claus, or something. But it won’t last. Here’s the skinny on fat people, according to my copy of The Secret Family:

[B]y the age of seven, children will avoid sitting near even a cardboard cutout of a fat person. It continues. American teenagers prefer pictures of ‘people with facial disfigurement, a hand missing, one leg, blind, or paraplegic’ to one showing a fat person.