C and NC playing together in one of our increasingly rare Tennessee snows

Anyone who reads my blogging with any regularity knows about my four year old daughter C and her same-age cousin, NC, and the special relationship that the two little girls have with each other. Really, the girls are far more like twins than first cousins.

When I remarried in 2006 and learned that I was expecting a baby in the summer of 2007, I was nervous about how my three oldest children – who would be 15, 12 and 10 when their new baby sister arrived  - would handle things.  Because my three oldest children were very close to one another, I was concerned that their youngest sibling was going to be SO much younger than they were that she wouldn’t get to enjoy the same superclose sibling bond with the rest of my brood.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry a bit. Although my eldest child, my 15 year old son Henry took a few months to decide what he thought of the baby, he was soon cooing at her and tossing her in the air and playing guitar for her, and as for my 12 year old daughter J and 10 year old son E, they pretty much thought that their new baby sister hung the moon from the first time they held her in the hospital. So the sibling bond I worried might be lacking due to the big age difference was not an issue. My kids pretty easily evolved from a tight knit sibling group of three to one of four.

But even though my older kids loved their baby sister, and enjoyed entertaining her, the age difference did mean that as she grew into toddlerhod and needed actual playmates, things were going to be different than they had been when the three oldest were little and had each other to play with.

Enter NC.

I was thrilled when I found out that my sister – who lives very close to us in the same town with her husband and kids – was expecting her third and youngest baby in the same month of 2007 that I was expecting C. That meant that even though C’s older sibs were much older, she’d have a readymade playmate in her cousin. My sister Betsy and I crossed our fingers that the babies – whom we learned halfway through our pregnancies would both be girls  - would like each other.

As it turned out, I have never met two children who did not gestate in the same womb at the same time who are closer and more attached to one another than the now four year old girl cousins. The two of them are hilarious, with TOTALLY different personalities (NC: future Oscar winning actress, C: Future poetry professor at small liberal arts college) but they just adore one another, and spend every minute they can together. In fact, they are sitting at my feet together, playing something called “alien barbies go to North Carolina for vacation” as I type this.

As I’ve been sorting and organizing all kinds of family photos this last week of 2011, looking back over the past 12 months, I realized that it’s been a long time since I added photos to the ongoing “Cousin Photo Timeline” that I started when the girls were just newborns. But now I’ve updated with photos of them together up to the present – age 4. I plan to keep this photo project going for them until they are all grown up, at which point I can use it to entertain folks at the girls’ respective wedding rehearsal dinners ;-)

The girls meet for the first time

C is 3 weeks older than NC, so she's the one in my arms. Betsy and NC are in hospital bed.

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