Cousin Club For Your People!

“Cousins are friends that will love you forever”-Constance Richards

Have you also noticed similarities between grandmothers and fairy godmothers? :) This is why I like to call them “fairy grandmothers.” Fairy grandmothers enjoy creating magical experiences for their grandchildren.

Lots more on this, and more, can be found in my upcoming book: Nanahood!

For now, Cousin Club.  This club is a Nana-driven club for grandchildren.

In creating Cousin Club, my goals were threefold:

1. To help cousins develop fun, lifelong bonds with each other, and feel a sense of belonging

2. To teach them to serve others

3. To help them build an unbreakable connection with God

Here are the  “deets” (details) on the categories above:

1. Lifelong Bonds: Who doesn’t want fun, lifelong bonds with others? And when those bonds are with your cousins, there is just an extra level of je ne sais quoi, but I call it “snuggly safety.” Combining these two words, we get: “snafety.”:D. Think of being a tiny cousin, running around the home/yard of your grandparents, with other little cousins in tow. You can giggle forever about everything, including your mutual grandparents, and other common relatives. Therein lies home and snafety!:D When our daughter Theresa was in middle school, she said one day “Mom, there all these kids at school trying desperately to “fit in.” I don’t care whether I fit in or not, because I already know I fit in. I fit in with my family.” Cousin Club underscores that sense of family belonging.
2. Serving others: I wrote about how “Service is the only safe addiction” in a previous blog post, which you can find here:https://maryjobell.com/blog/service-is-the-only-safe-addiction  I wondered if I could teach my grandchildren to serve others at a very young age. Could instilling this habit in them help pave the way for their success as adults? Yes. Therefore, service needed to be a fundamental part of the Cousin Club, providing the cousins with more than just playtime. Our first activity involved delivering small New Year gifts to our neighbors in the “Cousin Cruiser” (our car).  Helping others can be a mirth machine. The kids were bubbling over with giggles that day. What’s more enjoyable than giggling with your best friends? Cousins can make wonderful best friends.
3. Forging a deeper connection with God:  I thought, “Maybe my small contribution of helping them memorize some scriptures could be valuable.” The idea of memorizing scriptures has been on my mind for years. I regret not helping my children memorize more scriptures when they were young. We did memorize a few, and we had a family theme scripture: “Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding, and He will direct thy paths.” My husband added clever motions to act out many of the words in this scripture. This is a core memory for our kids; many have mentioned how this scripture has guided them through the years. But I wish we had memorized a dozen or more scriptures. We read scriptures together, but memorization creates a kind of permanent magic, right?I remember my mom reciting the Gettysburg Address a few months before she passed away in her eighth decade. She was forgetting things by then, but she was so pleased that she could still remember this speech she learned in middle school. It gave her such joy to share it with us. Scriptures and other meaningful words are not only bits of comfort that we can later finger like amulets, they are power itself. They can help a tempted teen make a better choice. They can inspire confidence. They can calm us down. So we started memorizing during the Cousin Club Retreat…

The Cousin Club Retreat was created for our Cousin Club Leadership team, which currently consists of the three oldest cousins, aged 7 and 8. When the team and I were holding a planning meeting one day, something whispered “These girls will be leaders one day in their communities, and most importantly in their own families.” These meetings were important.

When I suggested to my husband that we have a “leadership retreat” for these girls, he was on board. He suggested using our vacation home in Canada, and we spent a week crafting, swimming, playing, memorizing a longer scripture, and discussing plans for serving the younger cousins. There we decided to organize a surprise party to celebrate the younger cousins. Every little child deserves to feel cherished, we decided, just for existing. The older kids knew they had the power to help the little ones feel extra special. They popcorned lots of ideas. We passed around a hairbrush as a “microphone” to try to cut down on interrupting. The retreat was a noisy, happy success.

But you don’t need a retreat for Cousin Club. We often hold meetings at home, or in a local, casual restaurant. Our service “missions” are local.

Would Cousin Club work for you and yours? I encourage you to find out! If you’re concerned about starting a club for grandchildren who live far away  (10 of our grandkids live very close), and for more cousin connection ideas, (as well as lots of other things “Nana”), stay tuned for Nanahood! the book.