The thrilling conclusion to the epic "Hung out at my parents' house Saturday" saga

As I wrote about yesterday, my son loves seeing his extended family, and, after what I'm sure seemed to him like millenia, he got to do just that this past Saturday.

We headed over around noon.  He was dancing in his carseat for the short ride over to Poppa & Mimi's house.

When we pulled up, he tried to race ahead of us up their porch steps, yelling for his grandparents the whole time.  We were just ringing the doorbell and he was already standing on the doorsill.  When his Mimi answered the door, you would have thought it was his birthday and he'd just been told we were celebrating Christmas early by taking him to Disney World.

Of course, he loved on Mimi for about 15 seconds before he was demanding his Poppa.

You ever had a new puppy?  You know how the puppy acts every time you get home, whether you've been at work all day or just ran down to the gas station for five minutes?  That's how my son is with his grandparents.  He sees them almost every other day, and he's just as excited to see them every time.

But that's nothing compared to how he is about his older cousin.

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Never work with kids or animals...

One of the things I absolutely love about my family is that my son has three cousins, all of whom live very close and whom he gets to see quite often.  They're also all very close in age, all under three.  I'm the oldest of three sisters, with only four years age difference between myself and the youngest, and we all had babies around the same time.  (It makes for interesting family get-togethers.)  For the sake of simplicity, here's how the babies and ages breakdown:

Cousin A - daughter of 2nd sister, just shy of 3 years-old
C - My (1st sister) son, about to turn 20 months
Cousin L - daughter of 3rd sister, 10 months
Baby I - son of 2nd sister, 4 months

Now, ever since Cousin A, the oldest was born, my parents have very generously taken the babies for portraits every 4 months, just adding babies as they come, basically.  Everyone gets individual portraits, but there's also always at least an attempt at a group shot.  Last time, because Baby I wasn't here yet, it was the older three cousins, and it actually worked out okay.

This past Saturday, we tried to take one with all four.

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