Cousins Equal Fun

Cousins are different beautiful flowers in the same garden.  ~Anonymous

Here are a couple of the beautiful flowers in my garden of grandchildren - two little cousins who enjoyed an early Easter celebration at my house yesterday. We were sort of surprised by the early morning rain. The weather forecasters had said there might be a stray shower. It rained solidly for several hours. My daughter said it must have been the weather guys' April Fool's joke on us. It did mess up the Easter egg hunt we had planned. We hid the eggs in the house which didn't make the hunt very challenging for the older grandkids. The sun did come out and the kids did spend most of the afternoon outside but it was very wet when they were anxiously ready to do the Easter egg hunting. You can only hold off kids eager to hunt candy for so long. My two oldest grandkids didn't hunt eggs. They're growing up. One of them will be graduating from high school this year. How quickly the years zoom past. 

Going "home" to grandma's and grandpa's and playing with cousins can be one of the best memories of childhood. I certainly remember the many good times I had with my cousins when I was a kid. We played in the fields and woods and thought up some neat adventures. In a way, I can attribute my beginning to write to playing with my cousin and my sister. They, along with me, starred in the first book I started writing when I was a kid. We had fun in my imagination too. 

Cousins can be such great ready made friends. Supplied by family with no effort on the child's part. Connected to one another by family ties and sometimes similar backgrounds. My children had great fun with their cousins, and it's good to see their children playing together now. My children got to see their cousins often since my sisters and I live in the same community. My grandkids don't live close together. So they don't see each other but a few times a year, but they know how to have fun together when the opportunity pops up.  

Did you have cousins you played with as kids? Have the bonds of friendship endured through the years? I don't see my cousins much any more. A couple of them live in California and I doubt I'll ever see them again. But the memories of good times together linger and bring smiles. 

Thanks for reading!

Another Favorite Sunday

~~What's your favorite way to spend Sunday? We had a good one here with a touch of Spring after the snow last week. Got up in the fifties. Felt like it had been July since it had been that warm. Well, October anyway. The thing about Kentucky weather is that it's changeable and so it's unusual not to have some pre-season warm days in January and February. We sneaked one in here on the last and it looks as if the kids in our county might have to go to school all week long. It's been a while since that happened.

~~So today I enjoyed the sunshine on a Sunday. And I thought about how I spend Sundays. Church, of course and tonight I went to hear my husband's Southern Gospel group, the Patriot Quartet, sing at a church here in town. That's them in the picture. My husband's the one singing bass. Or since I guess it's a little hard to tell which one that is in a picture, the one on the right. I've spent a lot of Sundays at gospel music concerts.

~~When I was a little girl I spent most of my Sundays playing with my cousins as our parents took turns visiting back and forth. We had a ball and in fact that's when I started writing. I made up a story with me and my sister and my cousin as kid detectives solving a mystery out on the farm. That was fun. And started me down the writing path that I'm still going down all these years later. It's a path that's been frustrating at times but one I've never considered stepping away from. That's because I love stringing words together to tell stories. Even when it's hard. And it is hard a lot of the time. But then there are times when the characters come to life and the stories come together and then that sweet reader somewhere tells you that favorite line "I couldn't put it down."

~~But I've not spent too many Sundays writing except for a few hours doing journal entries. Another kind of writing I enjoy and one that is never hard because in a journal anything goes - as some of you who have been reading this on-line journal surely have noticed. You probably wonder what bunny rabbit I'm going to chase after next. And if you stick with me on those rabbit chases, thank you. If you don't, then you're probably not reading this. But that's another great thing to do on a Sunday - read. That's a great thing to do any time. And be with family. We did that a lot when our kids were little. They got to grow up playing with their cousins the same as I did. And now I go see my Mom on the Sunday afternoons I'm not traveling with the quartet to wherever they're singing or my own kids aren't here visiting.

~~I guess I think of Sundays as days for church and family. Good days. I hope you had a good Sunday today and that you can think back to many Sundays of good times. If you've got a minute, it might be fun to hear your favorite Sunday times.