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Congratulations and may you receive many more blessings before you "shuffle off".

My husband comes from a small family: paternal grandfather was an only child, he had two children and those two had only two between them. The next generation, mine, though, had seven between them and that generation is just getting started with only one of the seven married so far and he has two children (twins). Maternal grandparents on hubby's side had seven kids and each of them has had anywhere from two to six kids. We don't know all of my husband's cousins, mainly because the family is only loosely in touch these days. No feuds or divorces or anything, just the pace of life.

I come from a prolific family also: one grandfather had thirteen natural siblings, another had nine; my grandmother was one of six. My two sets of grandparents had six and four, and those sets of aunts and uncles had, let's see, 3-3-3-4-4 and 5-5. That's 27 cousins on my side of the family, plus me and my two siblings, or 30 grandkids for my maternal grandparents, which they lived to see and usher in some great-grandkids. Most of those cousins now have kids of their own and two kids is rather unusual in my family. Of all these people mentioned, the grandparents have now gone on, as has one aunt, one cousin and a son. All the rest are alive, healthy, productive, not in jail, and happily married. We lucked out.

I'm looking forward to grandparenthood someday but not too soon as my kids are still in school and barely 20 and 19. But grandkids and other family members are what makes life worthwhile in the final analysis. By the way, a lot of my family and that of my husband come from Viking stock also. In fact the whole family on both sides come from Northern European stock, so now I can say we're just trying to stave off European extinction instead of over-populating the earth. ;o)