More cousins!

You thought I was up to my ears in amazing family that lives near by, and you are right, but now I'm past my ears!

Our cousins Nate and Jaimie (one is a cousin, one is the cousin's fiancée, but I won't tell you who is who so there will be no biases) who previously lived a short 3-4 hours away in Portland have moved up to Seattle and now live only 1.5 miles down the road!  It's a little too far for my taste because we tend to walk everywhere, but if we walk fast it is only about 25 minutes. 

On their first weekend here, we all went to watch Max's regatta.  As five cousins (me, Ken, Nate, Jaimie and Kelsey) packed in the car and drove to the water, and I thought, "Wow, this is the Pierce childhood I missed out on!  All the cousins together hanging out all the time."

I thought about that for a couple of minutes and realized how very untrue this long-held notion was.  As little cousinettes, Caitlin and I always felt so left out because we lived in New York and only saw our mom's side of the family once every year or two (or three, depending on the availability of the family member).  I'm sure Lindsay felt this way too, but she was so much younger that she legitimately was left out.  And for good reason!  A ten year old does not want to play with a five year old.

When Cait and I went to Stanford, we began to get move involved.  We saw the Pierce family much more frequently, flying up to Portland 2-3 times per year.  When I moved in with my grandmother the summer between my first and second years of grad school, I totally made it in the cousin world.  Not only did I hit it big with my first cousins, but my second cousins as well!  Now we live in happy cousin harmony, in the idyllic world I dreamt of being a part of as a child.

However, thinking more realistically, back then, one first-cousin family lived in Portland and the other in Seattle.  I don't think the two families drove 3-4 hours to watch each others sporting events.  The second cousins didn't see each other that much, either, because one family lived in Connecticut while the other two families, who are not close in age (and therefore probably didn't have an amazing, jealous-worthy time when they got together), were in Portland.  The first cousins (the Pierces) and the second cousins (the Harrises) aren't really close, and I doubt they saw each other at all outside of weddings and funerals.  We Hogan girls were not nearly as left out as we imagined.  Except Lindsay.

But it's a good thing that I perceived myself to be left out for 18 long years, because I have since made huge efforts to see my cousins (and aunts, uncles and grandmother) much more.  I've tried to go to all the cousin weddings since they started, and have only missed two.  I even flew out for the bridal shower for one of the ones I couldn't go to be a good cousin.  In the past month and a half, I have seen at least 7 aunts, 3 uncles, 1 grandmother, 11 cousins, and 3 baby cousins, and only 6 of these encounters were due exclusively to the family women's weekend.  And finally, the most impressive example is that I moved to Seattle.