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.