I'm pleased and proud to announce that yesterday
morning at 3:09 am, my brother's wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy,
Deklan Patrick. He's my first nephew and the girls' first cousin. That
is, the first cousin they've ever had. (Who also happens to be their
first cousin.)
I'm all for cousins. I have seven of them myself,
varying in age from ten years older than me to eighteen years younger.
I saw them all on a fairly regular basis growing up, some more
regularly than others. Family get-togethers were always so much more
appealing when cousins were involved. Adult relatives were all well and
good, but not terribly exciting. Cousins, on the other hand, were this
cool cross between a sibling and a friend. They were (sometimes
surprisingly) different from you in terms of appearance and
personality, and yet you had a sort of conspiratorial connection: you
were all from the same crazy family, with parents who grew up in the
same house, and you a shared set of grandparents. (Although, actually,
in the case of one of my grandparents, this last fact made me jealous
sometimes: She's my grandma! Not yours!)
I am glad that the girls will have a cousin not too
far apart in age from them. It seems like a big gap now, but it's
almost exactly the age difference between my brother and me, and we
have always been good friends. I'm looking forward to bringing the
girls up to meet the little guy, hopefully in a few weeks, once we're
in the clear from a recent H1N1 scare. (A kid in the girls' preschool
class was diagnosed last week, so we've been on symptom-watch, but
nothing so far....unless holding in your poop so you don't have to go
on the toilet because you're scared and then letting it rip in your
pants counts as a symptom, in which Elsa's had H1N1 for two weeks now.)
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