The Perfect Family

In my mind the "perfect family" would be a mix of early colonial American Housing(everyone stuffed into a one room log cabin), the 1950ʻs "Leave It To Beaver" (Dadʻs commute was 10mins and mom had fresh cookies every afternoon) & all the technologies American family can enjoy today. I wish my extended family all lived in the same town and that we had family dinners every Sunday after church. Holidays would last days and include aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws and anyone else that needed a place to go. Thatʻs NOT my family. To start, I live 30 miles from my nearest relative & he is a second cousin that I see more often when I travel 5 hours back to NJ than I do here. The remaining majority of my family is spread across the Eastern Seaboard. Five hours one way and fifteen the other but there are those few that "broke away" and flowed West. Most of my family I go years without seeing, you know the wedding & funeral crowd, that is our relationship now. This is not what I imagined my family to look like; me, my husband and children living hundreds of miles from our parents and siblings. With little to no relationship with the cousins I grew up with as best-friends and hardly knowing my nieces & nephews, but that is what I have. As I move from Thanksgiving that was spent at home, just the five of us, I hope that Christmas and the coming year will find me closer to this "Perfect Family" I think I want:)