Cousins

The Easter weekend was a hectic but mostly fun time here. Saturday, or Easter Eve as my children like to call it, involved tearing our house apart and trying to put it back together again ahead of visitors that we were expecting on Easter Sunday. Kids ran every direction possible, except towards us, hiding in the hope they wouldn’t be asked to do anything, and developed a selective deafness as we bellowed their names and most unfairly asked them to put their shoes in their rooms and hang up their coats. The mere suggestion they might do something further to help us prepare for the next day, resulted in protests of ruined childhoods, exhaustion and a general breach of child labour laws. Needless to say their protestations fell on deaf ears! In typical Irish style, I peeled what felt like a thousand potatoes and two tonnes of carrots to go with the roughly ten other types of vegetables that we had for the next day. I was almost drowning in vegetable skins but sure, you know yourself, you couldn’t have anyone going hungry.wink emoticon

Sunday morning saw excited children swap carefully chosen eggs and soon after the countdown to their cousins arriving began. When the cousins finally arrived the noise decibel levels went through the roof and hyperactivity of levels rarely seen before, kicked in. Its occasions like this among all the excitement and craziness that I am reminded what is truly important to my children. While they were looking forward to seeing what eggs they would receive, most of the excitement was reserved for the arrival of their cousins.This was what really made the day for them.

I love to watch my children together. I think they’re pretty close (that’s not to say they don’t kill each other frequently too) but they look forward to seeing each other after school and when one gets back from a playdate or an overnight stay with their grandparents. I have always taken particular comfort that they’ll have each other as they grow up but I suppose that will largely depend on whether or not they make the effort. I really believe in the “monkey see, monkey do” theory. It has come back to haunt me on plenty of occasions when my kids have reacted as I have, or said something that I have said (and definitely shouldn’t have!). The same I believe will apply to their involvement and contact with each other as they grow up, and go on possibly to have their own families. As adults they will have influences other than their original nuclear family in their lives. I hope they will remember the fun that they had with their cousins and grandparents and consider it high on their list of priorities and try to recreate the same fun for their children. I hope they will recognise the importance their parents placed on their own siblings and remember to be there for each other. Mostly, I hope they’ll still be the same (mostly) close knit bunch of lunatics that they are today.