As of last week (welcome, baby Leo!) there are fourteen children between my sisters and me, most of them under the age of eight. Family gatherings? A madhouse! A fabulous, wild, zany, drooly, crawly love of a madhouse. Each time the gaggle of them are together, I remember my own childhood days spent with cousins....especially in the summertime. When we ran free and wild and swam all day and made our own world, separate from the adults (who surely were enjoying their own time). This weekend we hosted a few cousins for a farm sleepover and I found myself flooded with those memories at every turn, grateful for their close connections, and looking forward to watching them pick right up again where they left off next time they gather.