It was a heated argument. The kind that shakes the ground. That ends friendships. That counseling is required to remedy, and that in another place and time might have led to war between clans. Something good? Something juicy? Nope. The proper name of the new Jurassic World Blizzard at Dairy Queen. If you’re wondering, it’s “Smash.” My wife’s cousin and her 11-year-old son, Adam, were in town for the week. The boy is my 9-year-old daughter’s second cousin. Except, as they both come from only-child houses, they are about the closest thing they have to siblings. And pseudo-sibling-hood, I quickly found out, comes with all the accoutrements of real-life siblings. Namely squabbling. “See,” my wife’s cousin told me as she walked out the door during the Dairy Queen debacle. “Now we know what it would have been like if we had more kids.” My goodness. I see it all the time with other siblings. The fights over nothing. The shoving and the crying. The name-calling and hair pulling and tit-for-tat. Shoot, I don’t think my brother and I had a conversation that didn’t involve the words “butt” and “face” until I was 35. But suddenly it was my house sounding like two rumbling volcanoes trying to work it out. Like sitting on the sofa. Territorial lines were drawn across the cushions as if there was an imaginary Berlin Wall. Should a stretching toe so much as crossover, alarms were set off, fighter jets scrambled and great mayhem ensued. “Did you … Continue reading The ‘sibling’ arguments between cousins