California for Stefani

I went to a cousins wedding yesterday and it has gotten me thinking this week about the relationship with cousins.  There are 7 siblings on my mom’s side of the family and other than 1 sibling, they all live in Canada.  This meant lots of time was spent together as family.  We didn’t get together just at Christmas, but throughout the whole year.  Kids spent nights at each other’s house and families visited.  All of us cousins got along and enjoying spending time with each other.  I remember thinking that it would be cool that this could happen even when we all grew up and have kids of our own.  As we all got older and into our 20’s, things started to change and soon we didn’t spend time together like we did before.  Now it is only at special occasions for the most part.  There are a few exceptions, but I will get to that. 

When you are kids, personality differences are an issue, but with family you just put up with it and learn to spend time together and enjoy it (or else LOL).  I guess as kids we don’t see those differences as much, but as we get older, those differences show up and I guess you start to realize that just because a person is a cousin, doesn’t mean you have to be friends with them and that makes sense, just because someone is related to you doesn’t mean you have to be a friend to them.   I totally get that, but it is so weird that we all grew up together for the first 18ish years of our lives and then slowly things change and soon we only see each other at the special occasions.  So this blog post is too the great memories I have of my cousins.  You all made my first 18 years of life fun, enjoyable and filled with memories (good and bad).

Who is first?  Who did we spend the time with the most?

Jen & Chris Cham – they lived in Vancouver (the big city).  We spent many many days with them.  We had many a sleepover at their place.  Their dad was Asian, so he introduced us to good Chinese food.  It is where we learned about Dim Sum and the love for ethnic food.  They also had the greatest new electronic toys.  I was the oldest of the group as Jen was Andrea’s age and Chris was Monica’s age, but we all still got along.  For the first few years we would all sleep in the basement together, but as we got older, Chris had to sleep in his room and the rest of us slept in a room together.  This was still in a time when we could wander the streets and not worry too much.  We loved walking up and down the alley and just spending time with our cousins.  We got to know some of the neighbour kids and had fun all playing together.  When we started to get older (in our teens) a bunch of us cousins got motorcycles and Jen and Chris upped all of us and got some pretty fancy dirt bikes.  I remember when Jen got her Mustang…what a great car that was.  Chris landed up going to college in Chicago for awhile.  He spent a lot of time away from home, so we didn’t see him a lot.  Now he is back and we see him more with his wife.  Jen has found her roots a little here and we get to see her more now at family gatherings.

 

Nathan, Mark & John – these brothers are actually my second cousins, but we spent so much time with them and they are such a big part of our family, that we just call them cousins.  They lived on a farm in Rosedale and we had lots of fun at their place.  The parents loved us girls because they only had the boys, so to have girls in the house was fun for them.  We would spend hours with them playing in the hay barn.  We even would help out in the barn with stuff like milking, cleaning poop, etc.   My funniest memory of Nathan is when we would stay overnight and we would make farting noises with our armpits.   When we moved from Agassiz to Rosedale, we would drive to school with Nathan in his Camero… Andrea and I always felt so special to be able to do that.  Nathan was my age and Mark was Monica’s age.  John was much younger than all of us.   I would say we spent a lot of nights at their place and when we had family gatherings at my grandparents place, they lived so close by that we would always wander over.  So many fun memories…the many farm workers they had would be a whole different blog post HEE HEE HEE.  Nathan let us (Doug and I) use his car for our wedding.  We also spent grad together.  When Nathan left for school, then we didn’t see much of him anymore.  Soon he found a great woman for his wife and they had 4 kids.  Mark married and had 2 kids.  We went on vacation with Nathan, Heather and 2 of the kids a few years ago and it has been great connecting with them a bit in the last 4 years.   We haven’t seen Mark at family gatherings much and we miss getting to know him and his family.  Nathan can’t always come because he is a doctor and they live on Vancouver Island, so we don’t see them as often as we would like either.  We do try to see them when we go out to the island.   Maybe in the future things will change a little because I miss visiting with Nathan and his family.

Cheryl & Heather – my cousins from Manitoba (for most of our childhood).  What can I saw about my beautiful twin cousin Cheryl (she is born on the same day as me)?  She was my arch enemy as a child for the longest time. Every time she would come and visit, her and Nathan would take off and I would be the third wheel.  But when it was just me and her, we were best of friends.  We went to visit them once in Manitoba and that was a lot of fun.  We were fairly young, but I think I remember a lot of it.  We would write letters back and forth throughout our teen years and once they moved out here, we spent a lot more time with them, but that wasn’t until our late teens (19 or so I think).  Heather was Andrea’s age and so I didn’t spend as much time with her, but I know Andrea and Heather spent a lot of time together.  Heather landed up moving back to Manitoba, so we really don’t see much of her, but Cheryl stayed here, met a wonderful man and had 2 kids who we still spend time with.   I love Cheryl’s story of meeting Paul and how her life unfolded with having James and then 6 years later after James, came Mikaela.  We got to be a big part of their life and we will forever be grateful.  It took a lot of effort though as we are very different people with very different views on life.   But all of us made that effort and I think it has paid off in the end.  Now we don’t spend as much time together, but as we all grow up, different people come into our lives and things change.  It is a part of growing up and that is just life.  Now we mostly see them at family gatherings and occasionally throughout the year, but not near as often as we did before when the kids where younger.   Maybe that will change someday again, especially if we move some place hot and then we will see them a lot more HA HA HA.

Kevin, Loren, Naomi, Cor, Sarah, Katrina & John – my Barg family…if you read my facebook page at all, you will see me mention the Barg girls a lot.  They are my quirky side…the ones I relate too even though we are all very different.  The girls live their life as they like it, not the way the world tells them too.  I grew up mostly knowing Kevin, Loren and Naomi, when they lived in Lumby.  I would spend a few weeks in the summer with them and as a family we would always go over Thanksgiving long weekend to do fruit picking and visiting the goat farm.  I loved spending time with my aunt Connie and my younger cousins.  Kevin is the same age as Monica and the rest of the kids are even younger.  Kevin and Monica (my sister) are 4 years younger than me.  I still enjoyed spending time with my cousins though and we did get in trouble for staying up to late giggling in the bedroom.  The other 4 in the family I didn’t really get to know until we were all adults because they moved away from Lumby to explore the northern parts of BC.  It wasn’t until they moved to Creston that we started to get to know the cousins a little better.  When Naomi was looking to spread her wings, we took her into our home many years ago and eventually she found her hubby (Nigel) and had 1 kid.  Of all the cousins, they are the ones we spend time with the most.  We don’t always see eye to eye about things, but we all have great conversations and we are free to believe what we want without judgement.  Cor, Sarah and Katrina are great facebook friends and I think if we lived closer together, we would still be face to face friends.  

Jorg & Ursula – my German cousins.  We didn’t see them much at all and so I don’t really have a lot of memories of them.  Jorg was a year older than me, but when he came to visit, you never would forget him.  He was this cute young boy with a great sense of style.  He even had someone offer to buy his clothes off him at the airport.  I think I really only got to visit with him closely once and it was unforgettable.   He died in his late teens so I didn’t get to know him too well.  I would have loved to have gotten to know him as an adult and I always wonder if we would have been friends.  Ursula is a number of years older than me, so I really don’t remember her much.  She is married now and has 1 kid.  We missed seeing them this summer because of work.

Gabriella, Markus & Thomas – again, not my direct cousins, but close enough.  They where a lot older than us, but we spent a lot of time with them as a family.  One of them usually would come with us to Lumby to visit the Barg family.  We would spend time at their place in Agassiz.  Not sure if we “played” with them much as we were a lot younger than them, but I do remember having good times with them.  Thomas is now married and has two kids, Markus is married, and Gabriella is married with 2 kids and we have slowly gotten reconnected with her and her hubby Art.  It is kind of neat when you get reconnected with family that you haven’t seen for a long time and realize that as an adult, the age difference isn’t as big of a deal as it was when you were a kid.  I look forward to seeing how our relationship develops as adults.

Jeremy, Suzanne & Mikki – my young farm cousins.  Jeremy is 11 years younger than me and he is the oldest in his family.  We really didn’t get to know them as well because of the big age difference.   We would spend time with them on the farm and when we all got motorcycles, they were one of the families that got involved in our motorcycle adventures.  As we have grown up, we really haven’t been too connected with this part of the family because we never developed the relationship as kids.  It has only been recently that we have done a bit with Jeremy and last year a bunch of us all went on a Disney cruise together.  I have enjoyed getting to know Jeremy as an adult.  Suzanne and Mikki are just so much younger, that I don’t think we have a lot in common.  But I really enjoyed the wedding of Suzanne yesterday and are very appreciative that we got invited even though we are not very close.   It is great to see family so happy and even if we only see them on family gatherings, at least we have that.

 

Here is a picture of the family trip to Hawaii when I was 17.  A lot of the cousins were together for 2 weeks.  I won’t go into great detail about the trip because I have good and bad memories about it, but it was a great experience (for the most part) and it was fun getting to know the cousins just a little bit better.  We will always have our “Knight Rider” memories and Nathan and his zinc sun tan lotion… we will never forget certain aspects of that vacation together.

I managed to get some family pictures at the wedding yesterday, so here they are…

My aunt Trudy with my cousins Jen (on left) and Chris with his wife (on right)

Jeremy, Suzanne & Mikki

My family

Cheryl, Paul, James (with his girlfriend) & Mikaela

 

As you can see my life has been full with cousins.  I am grateful for them.   They have brought me great joy and some really great memories.   Life changes as we get older, and it has been hard sometimes to get over the fact that we don’t spend as much time together as cousins as I thought we would.  We have our own lives and our own friends, but I enjoy the family gatherings when we have them so that we can catch up.

We all have dreams and we try to attain those dreams.  At least I do.  I generally don’t create dreams that I can’t attain because then I am just disappointed.  We have the little dreams, and we all have big dreams and right now our biggest dream is to be able to live in Southern California, but honestly, is this an attainable dream?  I don’t know as the US and Canada don’t get along well when it comes to moving across borders.  But why California?  Why not the Sunshine Coast?  Well, one reason is the sand…the sand in California is “real” (as quoted by my niece).  But why else?  Well… here are some reasons…

1.  There is something about the California Coast people that appeal to us… watching a bunch of business people go surfing at lunch is just cool.  There is a laid back lifestyle that appeals to me, which thankfully, the people on the Pacific Coast are slowly understanding.

2.  It is the part about our life that would mean starting over…cleaning the slate and trying to create our life to go a little better and maybe do things without the mistakes we made here.   I think that might be our financial hell talking though, so maybe once things look up a little better, we won’t be so down about not being able to move.

3.  We have some really cool friends in Southern California and I would love to live close by so we could get to know them more…how fun would that be. 

4.  Mickey Mouse lives there…really, how amazing would it be to live in the same state as Disneyworld?  Is that not everyone’s dream? 

So why not the Sunshine Coast…it is close by and the lifestyle is a lot like what they have in Southern California… or maybe Vancouver Island…especially the west side where all the surfer’s are…hmmmm…do we change our dreams?  Not sure and it is what we have been pondering.  Here are the reasons we stay here and we have to focus on them because even though the grass is always greener on the other side, our grass is what we have and we have to nurture it, water it and appreciate it.

1.  My parents…they are our best friends and we LOVE spending time with them.  They support us and are there for us through it all.  How could we move away from them? 

2.  Our current living situation…we may be having issues with the tenants downstairs, but the big picture here is that we have amazing landlords and something tells me we can be long time friends.  This is one our favourite places to live so far.  We love the area and we have the support to make our space look nice. 

3.  We can work here…in California we would not be able to work, so really, we have not choice but to stay because here is where the work is.  So our prayer is that we find jobs that can pay the bills and be able to travel to California to visit.

4.  Being a Canadian…well…I would love to be an American citizen, but after this year of watching all the American people grumble and complain about EVERYTHING and how non tolerant they are with differences in people, I am slowly understanding why we should be proud to be Canadian.  We grumble about our politics, but honestly, who can do better?  We don’t live in a perfect world and the only way we can change the people in politics is to go out and vote.  Stop criticizing everyone for what they do because I think the people in our government (for the most part) are doing the best they can for the person that they are.  There is no way I could do their job…I can’t imagine waking up every morning to people talking trash about me all the time.  I can’t imagine that is good on a person’s self esteem.   I am not saying I like how our provincial government is treating us, but I will not talk trash about them personally and when it comes time to vote, I hope I will vote for what works for me.  Do people not realize that we are all different and what works for one person doesn’t work for another…it is all about tolerance and I wish there was more of it around.  I just think as Canadians, we do a little better job of it and my hope would that we can move to California and show my American neighbours how it is done LOL.

5.  I need to focus on the positives…we live as close as we can get to the US without moving there.  We have the benefits of being a Canadian, but able to save some money by shopping in the US for the things that are cheaper there.  We live close to airports that allow us to visit Southern California for cheap.  We live in a very beautiful part of Canada and we should be very grateful for that.  Even though it rains a lot here, we have beautiful green scenery because of that rain. 

Dreams…I will hold on to the ones I have and hopefully they will all come true, but if they don’t, that is a part of life.   So many of our dreams have come true so really, what do we have to complain about…we need to appreciate what we have and not always focus on what we don’t have.  I have had a hard week with the finances, so I think that is what is bringing up these emotions…but I think it will start getting a little better soon with the new job I got and hopefully Doug will find something too.  We pray for guidance and I hope we follow where God leads us because I do know we try very hard to be aware of what God wants us to do. 

If we can’t move to California, I think the Sunshine Coast might be a goal for us at some point.  But it has to be where God wants us and not where we want to be.  I do believe that God gives us the dreams in our hearts though, so I think we will be ok.   Things don’t happen overnight, so we have to be patient and live for today…stop worrying about tomorrow.  Today we will enjoy our yard that has some newly planted trees.  Today we will enjoy a car that we can use for star gazing because the roof goes down.  Today we will enjoy our home because it is cozy and has our stuff in it.  Today we will enjoy my parents because they live close by and are fun to be around.  Today we will enjoy our friends that live here.  Today we will book vacations for tomorrow

The summer is over half over which really isn’t an issue for us since we usually don’t do much for the summer anyway.  Our vacation’s usually happen during the quiet times of the year when kids are in school.  We are looking forward to our short trip to California next month.  Only 5 nights away, but at least it is something and we get to see our favourite state.  We finally managed to get the hot tub up and running which is really nice.  Even though it is hot outside right now, it is still nice to sit in our hot tub.  We really missed it and it makes this place feel like home finally.  We did help out our landlords by making the front yard look a little less like a rental, and so we tore down the front fence and replaced them with pyramid cedar’s.  It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.  Now we can sit in our front yard and be proud of what it looks like.  We posted pictures of the process on facebook.  We had a lot of help from my family which is nice.  Even though we live in a rental place, we all still treat it as our own.  We used to own a house, so I guess we just appreciate our living situation.  Doug had a good interview at KalTire and he is waiting for a second interview.  I had a second interview at a bookkeeping job that could give me some decent hours, so this next week might bring us some much needed good news in our job situation.  Thankfully Doug enjoys his job at London Drugs, so if he has to stay there for now, that is fine too. 

This last few weeks has brought a lot of controversy regarding the whole gay marriage thing.  I guess I just don’t get it, what does it matter who gets married?  If two people of the same sex want to get married, how does that effect us?  I think people just don’t like change…I don’t get it though, we spend the first 18 years of our live going through oodles of change, so why are we so against it when we become adults?  I wonder how society took to the change of allowing divorce as easily as it is today?  How about black people being able to eat in the same restaurant as whites?  I recall there being a lot of uproar about that particular change.  Or even women having the right to vote…so much change, but in the end it was for the better.  So I guess all my gay friends just have to wait it out a few more years and then the rest of the modern world will adjust to this bit of change too.  I am grateful though that people stand up for their rights to live the same way as everyone else though.  I believe that we all have the right to live the way we want too and as a Christian, should we not be even more tolerable of change and the differences in people?    

I know that my views have changed as I have gotten older.  I am way less judgemental of people.  We all have our own life stories and this shapes who we are and we have to live within those parameters because that is all we know.  If God chooses to change someone’s heart then that is up to God and them and we have to right to butt into their lives.  Doug and I learned that early on in our married life…we tried to do things the “church” way and in the end Doug had a stroke we realized that we should have left well enough alone.   As Christians we need to be way more tolerable of each other.  We need to support people in who they are and just allow God to work in people’s lives the way he wants it to happen, not the way the “church” thinks it should happen.  I am grateful for my relationship with God/Jesus and I will always cherish my friendship with him.   I guess my walk is going to be different than other’s so I can’t judge others either when it comes to how they judge LOL.   I think this type of thinking makes it very hard to find “Christian” friends, which I really do miss, but I guess no Christian friends is better than judgemental Christian friends who think we are less of a person because we don’t go to church or don’t believe the way the mainstream “Christians” think.   We are grateful for my parents who do understand what we are going through in this matter… it seems they went through the same thing at our age with their age group.  Who knew this was hereditary LOL.  This is where we are glad we didn’t have kids though…who wants that for their kids?  Who wants for their kids to learn how disappointing the “church family” can be when you are taught all your life that they are the ones that should support you… I guess that is yet another part of life that changes… learning about the sin in this world.  I am not perfect (yes, I am admitting that), and I plan on learning for the rest of my life. 

I want to live my life with my eyes wide open, to be accepting of people no matter what and to allow God to guide me in all areas of my life.   I want to be accepting of change and how that will enhance our lives.  So much has changed in our lives from when we first got married 24 years ago… some things were not for the best, but some things God has turned into positive things even though it wasn’t supposed to go that way in the first place.    God blesses us no matter where we are and that is what I look towards… I want all of his blessings that he can pour on us… that is what I wish for.