Cousins!
I’ve got some awesome cousins. I was fun to reach out to them for pictures today and see who responded.
I’m still in touch with most of my family, which I just love. Social Media has made it really easy. Many of them follow this little blog, but Facebook and Twitter are also helpful. I actually joined Twitter in 2007 for the sole purpose of keeping in touch with my cousins. We were all graduating school and moving, and Twitter made it so easy to chat every day.
Many of my childhood memories involve cousins. We traveled a lot, but Dad usually took us places where we had family to stay with and play with. We also spent long weekends or a week over the summer with our families in Utah. Those were always pretty fun times.
As we got older, these visits stopped, and I lost contact with some of them. I’m happy that over the last few years we’ve gotten back in to each others lives.
Random memories with cousins. See if you can guess/remember which ones you were involved in:
- Sleepovers and laser pointers.
- Watching a horse be born on Easter Morning.
- Kinking the hose, putting it in our mouths, then unkinking it to watch it explode in our faces.
- Playing Aladdin on Super Nintendo and trying to remember the cheats to get back to the advanced level. (boy, girl, monkey, man = Aladdin, Jasmin, Abu, Jafar)
- Getting my shoe/foot caught in the chain of your bike, being stranded, then rescued by an old man in the neighborhood.
- Watching you eat peas 1 at a time with your fork.
- Disneyland.
- Les Miserables.
- Grandma’s golf cart.
- Sunday Dinners at Camille’s house with everyone talking at once.
- That first time I ever played celebrity and it was the most fun I’ve ever had with that game.
The best part about cousins is how different we all end up being, and how long we’ve known each other. I love that I can be close to these people who I might not be friends with otherwise, because we don’t really have that much in common. Also, most of my cousins are married, and they have the most fantastic spouses. Every single one of those people who married in to the family are awesome.
Make sure to say hi to your cousins today. Keep them close. It might be nice to have a Dentist, Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic, Baker, or whatever else “in the family,” but it’s also just awesome to be close with people who knew you when.
Today is also Pioneer Day in my home state of Utah. It was July 24th when the Mormon Pioneers first arrived in to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Both sides of my family were involved in crossing the plains to make it to what would later become Utah. They made that journey for religious freedom, and I am grateful for their sacrifice and courage.
What’s Tomorrow?
July 25th
- National Merry-Go-Round Day
- National Hot Fudge Sundae Day
- National Culinarian’s Day
- National Threading the Needle Day
- National Day of the Cowboy – Changes Annually July 25, 2015 – currently being researched
- National Dance Day – Last Saturday in July