Enjoying Time with Family

I've started a post chock-full of pictures from our trip, but since I've been busy updating the other blog, words will have to do here for a while.

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My mom is the last child, the caçula, or raspa do tacho (scrapes from the pot's bottom), who was born when my grandma was 40 years old and already had four children, the youngest of which was already 8 years old (my aunt). So growing up, in spite of the fact that the extended family on my mom's side is very close-knit all my my maternal cousins were on average 8-10 years older than me, so I never got to play with them and only enjoyed their company after I was a teenager.

In my father's side of the family, however, dad is one of the oldest of 8 children, and so I am the third oldest grandchild. I always enjoyed spending time with my paternal cousins, and someday I want to write about two of them in particular who are like siblings to me. My dad's family is really complicated and I don't want to get into that too much because someday family members may read this blog. All that matters for today's subject is the fact that we were quite close to my dad's youngest sister's family.

I was always in awe of my aunt because at the young age of 28 she had three children, the oldest of whom (a boy) was only three years younger than me (he was born when auntie was 18-19 and my parents were 30 when the had me) and really a great companion to my (younger) brother and I. We visited them often and played a lot together. My girl cousin was 6 years younger but I enjoyed her company too, particularly because she loved gymnastics, which was also a passion of mine. My youngest cousin was the baby we enjoyed carrying around and playing with. My older cousin Fábio was a voracious reader like me and sometimes when we visited we went on a "reading binge" and I remember that one day in which read three books together (these were longer young adult books too). They only visited us once during the five years we lived in a boarding academy in the countryside many hours from the state capital where they lived, but that was a really memorable visit! My (girl) cousin was only six years old, but she remembers that we went hiking on the wheat fields...

Some years later in 1986 or 87 when we were already living in São Paulo, we drove to the center of town one Friday night and went up to a hotel room where we said goodbye to aunt, uncle and our three dear cousins. They were coming to live in the United States. Many years went by until I was able to see my cousins again (my aunt and uncle came to Brazil once and we saw them quickly). In 1993 when I visited the U.S. for the first time with my husband (then boyfriend) and family we stayed at their house in the Miami area for a couple of days and then I visited for five more days at the end of my trip. The next time I saw them was in 1997 when we drove to Miami to pick up my parents who were coming to visit us. Later they moved from Miami to Nashville and my aunt and uncle visited us a couple of times, but only their youngest son came with them once. In 2003 my cousin got married and I came to her wedding which was really nice because another cousin came from Arizona as well my uncle who lives in D.C. and his daughter.

In 2006 we came here to visit them again because I had a conference to attend (long time readers may recall that my blog disappeared from the internet the night before my trip to Nashville) and it was lovely to meet my cousin's beautiful daughter who was 18 months at the time. Now little cousin is almost three and she and my boys are enjoying their time together while the adults spend long hours talking and reminiscing about the past. It's really good to be able to spend this time with cherished family members. We didn't get to grow up together and interact for many many years, but we're still family and we love each other. We just miss my older cousin who still lives in Florida (good thing I saw him at my cousin's wedding, but my parents haven't seen him in over ten years). Well, that's life... I like it better when it's just geographical reasons that separate us from family members and not other kinds of "walls" that are much harder to break, but I don't want to talk about those problems here.

Pictures are forthcoming...