These 11 other kids are my cousins on my Dad's side of the family. We seemed to spend every holiday, every weekend at the Lake, and every Sunday at church, together as one giant hysterical family. Now that we are all "of age", we sit around and tell stories of the days of old like we were all college buddies back in the day.
We all grew up in our own little world. The older kids were the cool ones, at least to Ben and I. The triplets (the next three youngest cousins) were probably too young to understand "being cool". We all understand how weird it is that we've all remained as close as we have. We've all squished onto one queen size air mattress, ate nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for 3 days straight, we can all give you the hand signals for faster, slower, circles, and stop, we've picked on each other until we cried, laughed at each other until we cried, and over 20 years, we've all grown to know and love each other better than some siblings ever do in a life time.
Fran was the first to get married out of all of us, and the first to have a baby. I was a year or so behind them, followed by Matthew about another year later. I love that I can now have an "adult" conversation with the cousin I grew up with about the struggles and joys of raising a child. All of us hope that our kids could grow up around each other the way we did. It's not very likely considering the distance we have all put between us, but maybe with technology now a days they can have something similar.
This is Caitlin and Elena's (Fran's little girl) first encounter as toddlers. It was very rewarding to see the two of them play together. Even if Caitlin seemed to bring out the rambunctious side of Elena... :)
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