Cousins return

N’s been missing his cousins, more specifically his youngest cousin, while they’ve been on holiday.

He’s got 5 boy cousins and 1 girl cousin from 2 families, one of whom he used to do 2 days a week with to help us out on childcare.  One was at school most of those days, but N was like the 4 year old’s shadow.  It’s all been change since the school holidays as he’s no longer looked after there and is essentially in nursery full time, so it means his cousin’s been missing him and vice versa.  Then with holiday on top… the excitement when he was told they’d be back yesterday was immense.

Sunday arrived, and in the afternoon the holidaying cousins popped over, as well as one of the older cousins.  N had a great time running round chasing his cousins, playing in the garden with them.  The older 2 were mucking around on N’s rocker toy (trying to get me to video them falling off so they could send it in to You’ve Been Framed!), then tried to persuade N to do totally unsafe things like catapulting him off etc.  The older cousin who was round is a bit of a daredevil;  he was probably disappointed I was putting the kibosh on his exciting and risky loonatic ideas.

It’s always great to see them all playing together – they always keep an eye on N too, so I can relax a bit more and not have to watch him like a hawk the whole time he’s in the garden.

The youngest cousin will be off to school in September, so it’ll be interesting to see how his and N’s relationship changes given school can be quite a jump up in development.  Hopefully they’ll still be friends and N won’t be seen as ‘too young’ for him.