We are the Canter family. If you were to reduce us to the size of stickers and slap us on the back of a soccer mom’s minivan we would take up about a third of the back window. From left to right you would have Dad (Steve), Mom (Jennifer), Katie Beth (Kootie Breath), Maddie (Mad Dog), Michie (Girl Friend), and our dog Cincy (Stupid).

The Canter name derives from Anglo-Norman French cant ‘song’ and is a nickname for someone who had a good voice or who sang a lot. Ha!!! Don’t tell my daughters, but no one in our family can sing anywhere close enough to be named for their singing.

But, our family is not defined by the sound made from the ordering of letters. And, the only thing that stickers on a minivan tell you about a family is that they are dorks (If you got the stickers, I’m not sayin, I’m just sayin).

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The point is a rose gets it worth by its recognizable smell, not its name. Call us the Canter's, but we still can’t sing. Put our likeness perfectly in line on the back of a minivan, but we are still not going to be perfect.

In one word let me try to describe our family. I’m going to pull a Jedi mind trick and make two words from the one word. Oooohhhh!

 The word is dysfunctional. Our family is not perfect and we each have our own little quirks…

• Michie, she laughs at her own jokes; even the ones that aren’t funny (She get’s it from her dad).
• Maddie, she has to have everything just perfect and her way (She gets it from her dad).
• Katie, she washes and dries clean clothes she pulled out of the drawer because they feel “googley” when she put them on (She gets it from her dad).
• Jen, she hides Coke like a crackhead hiding her next fix and tries to convince me she only had one to drink (I’m not taking blame for this one).
• Me, I have confessed enough.

We are dysfunctional, but we put the FUN in dysfunctional. Fun is a value for us. We tease, we laugh, and we play old school board games together. We genuinely have fun with each other. Basically we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We know no one else does.