Strength in numbers. This applies to many things: the Warriors, Saratoga High, the U.S. Military and —
Our family.
To be fair, we did look like a small army while marching down to the theater entrance when we went to go see “The Jungle Book.” The poor, unassuming cashier nearly popped a blood vessel as his eyes bugged out when all 19 of us invaded the theater. We were armed with our buckets of popcorn, bags of Sour Patch Kids and matching blue raspberry Icees.
When he finally asked for our tickets, Amulya’s dad handed him the full roll. They tumbled down like a scroll, hitting the floor along with the man’s jaw. It was like something out of a comic book. We held our laughter as he hunched his shoulders and asked, “How many adults in the party?”
There couldn’t be a more accurate description. Our huge, rollicking, crazy, totally awesome and lovable “party” is comprised of our two common grandparents, plus several others who we refer to as “grandmother” or “grandfather”; four adult siblings, two sisters and two brothers; their spouses; and us, nine cousins whose ages range from 9 to 22.
As we said before, it’s like a small army. Which, understandably, is sometimes cause for some really interesting moments.
Like that one time all 19 of us went on a cruise to Mexico. In those five short days, each of us ate our weight in lava cake. And on the day trip tour around a not-so-exciting Baja, California, town, we had each other to stay entertained, even as the tour guide tried to build excitement over sights like gas stations and grocery stores.
Sure, there’s the occasional spat, but it’s usually over whose turn it is to choose what movie to watch. To be fair, the movie-choosing process has proved successful since the days of VHS tapes. Not much has changed since then; we are still as close as we have ever been.
For example, when the oldest child in a normal family leaves for college, he or she might have one or two siblings that feel the absence. But when our oldest cousin, Class of 2012 alum Anoop Galivanche, left for UCLA, he had left not only one younger brother, but also seven cousins behind.
We all FaceTime him for every birthday celebration and anniversary party; with only 52 weekends in a year, we’re pretty much partying all the time. And when he and our other cousin, Class of 2014 Notre Dame High School alumna Keerthi Vedantam, come home for breaks, we’re pretty sure that we infuriate the neighbors and violate the town noise limit with our screams of joy.
The Galivanche-Vadlakonda-Vedantam clan has all the crucial ingredients to be a successful sitcom or at least a reality-TV show. There are the nine cousins who know each other as well as siblings would; the four sets of parents; our sweet grandmother, who provided each of us with constant companionship during our earliest days and continues to keep our hearts full of love and our stomachs full of home-cooked meals; and our grandfather, who has a stash of wisdom (and chocolate) just for us grandkids.
So when the cashier finally counted all of our tickets and we all passed the narrow entrance of the theater, we all let out a huge laugh at the shock on the man’s face. We took up an entire row of seats, and earned ourselves plenty of dirty looks when we accidentally got to noisy swapping popcorn buckets and candy boxes. In the eyes of others, our family structure may be, to say the least, a bit much.
But we wouldn’t have it any other way.
