Family

At least once a month, I thank Jim for being willing to relocate to my hometown.  I realize it's only 45 minutes away from where he spent the majority of his childhood, but I don't think I'd be willing to move that far away from my family.

I live 5 minutes away from my Mom and Dad, my sister and I live in the same neighborhood, my brother is 30 minutes away depending on city traffic and we have family dinners with my parents, siblings our kids and my Mom's sister at least once (if not twice) a week.  My Dad and his brothers moved from their hometown and ended up living within 15 minutes of one another.  When I was growing up, my cousins and I lived on the same block and partially shared a yard.  All but one of my 1 cousins live within 20 minutes of each other and every year, my Dad's side of the family goes on vacation together; this year there were 22 of us.  And we make it a point to Facetime with my Aunt who lives 2+ hours away about every other week.  I will spare you the details of each of my second cousins, but as you get the point; family is important and proximity means a lot to me.

When we don't have someone from our extended family at our house, Cullen looks around and goes, "where is everyone?"  I've tried to tell him that when our family comes over that they're just visiting, he doesn't get it.  Like me, I'm positive that my children will be close with their siblings, cousins, Aunts and Uncles.  One of the reasons that we've remained close is because we make it a point to spend time with one another- hanging out is something that we're kinda of awesome at.

This weekend, we had the opportunity to pile into a beach house 11 strong.  Sure there were a  few little kerfuffles, but aren't there always?  Aside from that, there were also a lot of laughs and my husband even sprang into action to help someone who needed medical attention (it's he dreamy?).  Going to the beach is one of those things that my family's been doing for longer than I've been alive and I'm convinced it's experiences like this have kept us so close over the years.

Spending time with one another, as I've lamented before is something that I don't think I get to do nearly enough of, so I tried to savor every moment and image from this weekend.  I'm saying right now, that I will make it a point to do this more often, to not have days like yesterday where I only saw my kids for 40 minutes, whether my family likes it or not.