The Family Show

Well, the TV is still gone and we're still here. Life is actually pretty nice without it. The "void" it left has since been replaced by a painting that used to hang in my Grama and Grampa's living room. It's a painting of Lake Superior and has a lot of significance to me/us. Dan and I love the North Shore so it's sort of like a virtual (old-fashioned use of the term) window on the area. Makes us want to go back up and visit all the time... And it's also neat because of the family coincidence: my Grama and her sister apparently each purchased the exact same painting (not sure if it was from the same place or not, they didn't live in the same state!) without knowing it. Now that's cool. Family connectedness.

Which brings me to my next topic: family. We had a lot of family this weekend with two baby showers for my sister, a birthday dinner for my sister-in-law and a pizza party today at my Aunt & Uncle's house. Now some folks might think that all that family time is a bad thing, a burden, a pain. But I don't. I have a huge family and I *love* spending time with them. The baby shower at my Aunt's house had the traditional lacey umbrella out to signify a "shower" for one of the girls, the shower at my house was so fun with friends and family from my Mom's side, and the spur-of-the-moment pizza party was a wonderful way to keep talking and hanging out with the out-of-towners before everyone heads back home. There are new babies being born all over the place (my Jackson included) and the generations are shifting before our eyes. My cousins' kids are growing up and going off to junior high and high school (!), while some the younger ones are playing with Jackson like my older cousins used to play with me...

And...this one is confusing...the connections are truly mind-boggling when you think about Jackson meeting his 2nd and 6th cousin this weekend (all in the same little boy - a fellow baby newcomer to the family). His mom and I are 1st and 5th cousins because my dad and her mom are siblings AND my mom and her dad are 4th cousins. The 2nd and 6th cousin also has two older brothers so does that make him the third 2nd and 6th??? There's no incest there! Just a small world. (They discovered that at a baby shower for someone way back when in the 70s...wonder where the lacey umbrella was for that one?)

Who needs TV when you've got all this excitement?! And I think the painting looks pretty nice where it is. We're talking about the slight possibility of having a *small* TV on a cart that we could pull in and out of the closet for DVDs and Sesame Street. But we've got a couple of years before Jackson can watch it anyway.

Crawling, standing, walking? Stay tuned! Those things don't seem very far off! He watched his 2nd cousin (a different 2nd cousin from the one who's also a 6th) go crawling across our floor. Did a total double-take, as if to say "wait, THAT'S what babies are supposed to do?" Get the gates!