7 years old

My cousin has just left.
during the day, he managed to tickle me and my sister senseless, arrange many many attacks on uncle niall, get himself covered in mud, fall asleep on my knees, eat lots of stew, open lots of presents and generally be the cutest cousin ever. he has perfect manners too, fi and john have trained him well.

he is very cute.

you have to wonder why we can't all be like little children, ready to let go and be noisy and fall asleep when we need to and invite everyone that we love to our birthday parties and be so excited at the prospect of a gift, love giving hugs, plan multiple attacks on family members with 99p toys...

he lives in london, so i don't see him all that often and i do remember him being a tiny baby (which seems inconceivable now that he's seven -and weighs four stone, as he proudly told me whilst walking on my feet, so excited to go and take midge for a walk to the beach where we weren't allowed to take the boring path, we had to go down through the rocks and over the seaweed in all the mud.) and he's gotten so big now. i wish i was seven years old again. he just got the roald dahl books on cd for his christmas. i would (still) love that as a present! (hint hint ;) ... )

ah, he's just very sweet. but still even at that age he's been corrupted by the world. we walked up past the tay bridge, past some shrubbery that, when it was spring or summer spelt out FIFE. i spelt that, (f, i, f, e, so what does that spell?) and he said it spelt fucking. i was actually quite shocked, this beautiful little boy with his english accent saying that. so when he didn't stop, dad and i had to ignore him for a bit. it took all of a minute before he was saying, "i'm sorry, i'm sorry, please forgive me, " and all it took to let him know he was forgiven was to include him in the next conversation and laugh at his jokes and cheer him on. it was forgotten that we'd ever fallen out. so simple. but so sad that he has that in his vocabulary already.

anyway, that was my ramble. happy boxing day.