Whatever I write on this blog is either personal experience or memory. Which means that on occasion I get the facts wrong.
When I was in my teens I had a lovely bedroom all to myself and so did my brother and sister. And then one day an uncle and aunt came and asked whether we were willing to house a cousin of ours during the week. His school was in our home town and he and his parents felt he was a bit young to be living on his own, and traveling that long every day was not desirable.
My parents agreed and that in turn meant that the rooms were redistributed. I stayed put, but from then on I had to share my room with my baby sister. The horror! My brother moved into another room as well and my cousin got the big room with sink.
In my head I always thought that because my cousin came to live with us, my uncle (ie my cousin's dad) came to help put the partition up in my bedroom. I got corrected last night.
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| He is good at wall papering as well! |
In fact, my father had gotten some advice from a colleague and then together with my mum had proceeded to put the whole thing together. As he has two left hands (his own words, albeit his were in Dutch), he was very proud of the fact he managed to do it and to make it look good. And after 30-odd years it's still sitting pretty.
So, hail to my father!
I'm not sure anybody's memory is totally correct in the details.
ReplyDeleteHari OM
ReplyDeletehehe - nice correction to have to make! Yes, it's true, our childhood memories are often a little 'embroidered' from our having seen things a little differently in our youth, to the natural deterioration of memory, to the having heard about the story from others' perspectives over the years and absorbing them into one's own... YAM xx
Whenever I ask my brother about something we did together, he has completely different memories of what happened than I do.
DeleteOur mom shared a room with her older sister all her life. It would have been nice if we could have split a room in half so each could have their own space.
ReplyDeleteI had never to share my room with anybody as only child, I always had my own room. Only when I was with my grandparents I slept in the middle of the enormous double bed with them !
ReplyDeleteBeing an only...I never had to share my room. BUT my entire childhood we only had one bathroom. Then when I married our first apt had one bathroom. Our first house had 1 and 1/2 and now we have 2 1/2 bathrooms. A wise (giggle) woman once said a common sense house is a house with the same # of potties as there are people in the house. How many weeks was your cousin your house guest?
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter
Hugs Cecilia
My folks home had almost a revolving door of relatives and friends living with us girls and later just Mom and Dad. Granny spent almost every weekend with us. Daddy's Aunt Lillis would live with us for months at a time. Aunt Lillis had helped raise Daddy after his mom died in the 1918 pandemic.
ReplyDeleteWhen my brother was in his teens, there would be unplanned sleep-overs quite often of his friends, but other than that, the house was already quite full. And when my grandparents came to stay, none of us wanted to stay in the same room as they snored like whatever snores loudly!
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