[udontno]

My cousin is six years old. He will be seven when the baby is born. I think that is a great idea. I can't wait for him to open something. He loves to open presents, even other folks. We have a hard time keeping him out of the presents at birthday parties and stuff.

I know that I should let my aunt fight her own battle, but my grandmother makes it into everyone's battle. This woman lives two houses down and calls about ten times a day on the weekends and 6 on weeknights alone. She's called over ten times in two hours before to talk about mainly the same things. This will be a hot topic of conversation. When Phillip (my aunt's second husband, my cousin's father) went to jail, all she talked about was him for months afterwards. She still calls me sometimes and says that he wants to get back with Beth and all of the things he is saying about Dalton, how he misses him, etc.

He's gained a lot of weight while he has been in jail. He gets out (maybe) in June-ish and I think my cousin will be scared of him. He's not the same guy, honestly. My cousin also has little contact with his father's side of the family. They don't want to help out with him, like babysitting. They only want to do fun things with him like take him on vacations and have him over there at Christmastime. It's going to be rough when Phillip gets out, because I don't think Beth will want him around her or Tommy especially. I doubt they'll get along. It's kind of like when she divorced Michael, her first husband. I was close with him and he still wanted to come see us. She was married and Dalton was born shortly after her divorce to him (they'd been separated for a while, she was seeing Phillip then) and she did not want him around us at all because he was nosey and wanted information on Dalton and her. He still wants to get back together with her. It's such a small world, because Tommy was in a band (it recently broke up) with Michael's brother. Oh, the drama.

Anyway, I basically typed all of that to say that I will not be able to escape from defending her because it will be all my grandmother talks about.