My Summer - Kristina Lopez

The best part of summer was visiting my family in Houston, Texas. I haven’t seen my family from Texas in over 3 years and I haven’t seen my family from Mexico in seven so finally getting to see them was great. I have about 10 cousins my age that I actually hang out with but I have over 40 family members who actually show up. Most of my family lives in Mexico so it is a very big deal to get all of us together. I have only been to Mexico four times, (when I was younger) so when I get to see my family from Monterey and Dr. Gonzalez, Mexico I always make it the best I can. We party all night. Listening to music, playing music, making food, eating food, dancing, singing, running around, video games etc. we do it all. We are a tight family and will do anything for each other. This year we ended up going camping after the first week of haning out at home. We went to a very hot area and set up as many tents as we could fit around the camp spot. That night we had a bon fire and Barbequed all night. I played guitar and my aunt sang to it but it was really hard to keep the guitar in tune because of how hot it was in Texas. It was fun none the less, and I had an amazing time. I probably got five hours of sleep in that whole week of camping and on the last night we went to a deserted area and set off fire works and used sparklers while running around and singing to bad music. I had a hell of a time. In the morning to cool off my cousins decided to wake us up by throwing water balloons at us… in our tents. It was a very rude awakening at first, the girls were all very angry, but after the initial anger we got over it and now it’s just a big laugh. On the ride back from the tent area me and my cousins just talked about our lives, the things we like to do, the differences between were we live, the way we live, what we like to do etc. and we really got to know eachother better. Not having seen your family in years really makes you realize how much you can miss with time. I found out about the drama and the boyfriends and girlfriends. I got all the knowledge on there jobs, how money was looking in there family, and things like that. It felt good to know that even though I haven't seen them in so long that they are still my family, and they still trust me with help on advice or just telling me about there personal info. I grew much closer to a lot of them this trip and with the help of facebook and email I now have been keeping in touch and plan to visit them in Mexico when I get out of highschool.