Fiji: The Cousins

"I'm bored!" Orion laments pensively, just one day after returning home. "Yeah, me too," Apollo agrees, "Why did we have to leave Fiji anyways? We're out of school for the summer." 

"Because I had to go back to work," I said in defense.

"You could have left us at Uncle Gooch's for the summer and then came back and picked us up before school started again," Apollo argued.

"As nice as that sounds, it's not practical. We have pets that need us to take care of them. Plus, your mom and I have jobs we had to get back to." 

Orion was listening and processing our conversation. With a perplexed look on his face, he turns to me and asks, "Don't they have golf in Fiji." ~~~ If I relied on golf to make a living, we'd be homeless! I have Melanie to thank for instilling the belief in Apollo and Orion that my job is golfing. 

My brothers first born, Spyros, refers to Apollo and Orion as "the cousins" or "my cousins" when he is speaking of them. I'm not sure why I find it so endearing but I do. "Uncle Mark, can my cousins come swimming with me?" he would ask. The three boys were inseparable. 

 When Apollo and Orion met Spyros for the first time at only a few months old, they kept asking, "How long until he is old enough to play with us?" Now, four years later, they always ask "When can we see Spyros and Zosi again?"               I love that the age difference between all of them has not deterred them from enjoying one another.  They all find each other hysterically funny. Apollo has a knack for  picking up on and mimicking everyone's quirks, isms, and idiosyncrasies. While annoying to adults (albeit an invaluable skill set for a comedian if he should chose that career path), his peers seem to like it.  Apollo quickly keys in to what the kids he is around will find funny...which in this case translates into a 10-year-old acting like a four-year-old. (Insert eye roll here. Yeah, we are working on when this "talent" is appropriate and when it is flat out annoying).

 I will take this over Apollo thinking he is way too cool to hang out with someone so much younger than him. His charm worked for Spyros, and what is most important to me is that there was a lot of laughter from the three boys. It is that laughter and those kind of memories that form a life long bond. However, if I have to hear the term "poop-stank" one more time, I will pull my hair out...if I had any left.

 Zosi is too young to interact with the boys for a long period of time and mostly uninterested anyway, but she does chose to play with them for short periods of time. Zosi is the crème de la crème of the group. She may not be a morning person, but once she gets going, she is the sweetest and most easy going little girl. My favorite memory of her from this trip was at the Marriott resort. Zosi found some ants on a couple steps and plopped down to play with them. There were some black ones and some red ones, all very small. Zosi suddenly calls out, "OW, OW, OW!" and begins to cry. Being the closest adult, I ran to her and as I am scooping her up. I notice a couple small red ants on her that she is urgently trying to get off. I start brushing them off of her skin and in the sweetest, softest and most somber voice, she says through the tears, "The red ones bite me!" 

                      ~~~~~~~

By themselves, Apollo and Orion often will tell me that they are bored. This is a Hail-Mary pass on the off chance that I might allow them some screen time.
 Throw in some friends or cousins, and they can make a afternoon of adventures out of a simple cardboard box. Add an ocean of warm water, sandy beaches with rocks and shells, and they wont complain all day unless they are thirsty or starving.

While sitting on the beach, snorkeling, and swimming would be all that was needed to keep us and the boys happy, having Spyros and Zosi to adventure with was an added bonus for Apollo and Orion. It is interesting to note that the boys have a completely different set of interactions and memories with their cousins than what we saw and heard. We have been listening to stories about them since we left. I have to keep asking the boys, "When did that happen?"

            ~~~~~~~


Vacations can be hard and a lot of work, especially with kids. So often we get back from a vacation and we feel the need to go on a vacation to recover from our vacation. Fiji was nothing like that for us. There were moments of the kids not sticking with the script, or too many bodies to try to get from point A to point B, but in the end, we wanted more; More time in the water, more time in the jungle, more time exploring, more time with my brother and his family, and for the boys more time with the cousins. It's always best to leave the table a little hungry they say. 

On our last day in Fiji, the boys were grilling me about why we had to leave. As arguing my point would have been futile, I simply told them that "It's time to go home."
"We are home," Apollo stated.
"Wait," Orion asked completely caught by surprise, "are we moving here?"
"Well," Apollo explained, "dada always tells us that whenever you are together with your family, no matter where you are, you are home. So, we are home and that means we don't have to leave"