My niece Cora, who’s 7, has four missing front teeth. She is very proud of her increasingly toothless smile, and makes her mom fire up Skype each time she loses another one so she can show off the new hole in her grin. Kostyn saw Cora last month but never mentioned her Jack-O-Lantern appearance until today.

He was being silly on the way home from the grocery store, saying he was so hungry he was going to eat the store. And then he said he was going to eat a house, eat the world, eat that tree, etc. So when he said “I’m going to eat the car,” I challenged him.

“Eat the car?! I don’t know; the tires would be pretty chewy. Are you sure you could eat the car?”

He giggled. “Yes! I’m going to eat the car.”

“I think if you ate the car you’d break your teeth,” I said. “Then you’d have no teeth!”

Without skipping a beat he said, “I’d be like Cora!”

I chuckled and said, “Yes, like Cora.”

He paused for a few seconds, then quietly asked: “Did she eat a car?”

My sweet niece Cora, rockin’ the look favored by hockey goalies who don’t wear cages.