Some years ago, another lifetime perhaps, when I was a small child, I was an only child. Well, that is to say that my mother only had the one child. I was never truly an only child because as far back as I can remember I had an older sister.

My cousin, Amy, is approximately a year and a half older than me and we have always been close. We were raised less like cousins and more like brother and sister. We even fought like brother and sister, but that is not the point of this little tale. This is the story of two children, cartoons and cocoa.

All those many years ago, when we didn't have satellite TV and cartoons were a rare treasure on one of the four channels our TV received, my cousin devised a plan for a day I will never forget.

It was a Friday afternoon at our grandparent's house, with whom Amy lived and I frequently visited, and my cousin and I were discussing all the wonderful cartoons we would watch in the morning. As we made our plan to jump from channel-to-channel to catch all the best ones, my cousin decided that we would get up before the sun, before our grandparents or even before the old rooster across the street. She decided that we wouldn't miss a single good cartoon from the first one to play in the morning until that afternoon. Naturally I agreed with her plan and followed her lead.

I could hardly sleep that night, and perhaps I really didn't, but before I knew it there was Amy quietly trying to wake me. She lead me to the kitchen where she put a pot on the stove and began to heat up some hot chocolate. I don't even recall how old we were at the time, but I know I couldn't see the top of the stove. Amy heated up the cocoa on the gas range and then poured a mug for each of us and added lots of tiny marshmallows. It was cold out and the house didn't have central heating so the cocoa was even better because of the cold. We went to the living room with our hot cocoa and blankets and sat in front of the TV. A few hours later that's where our grandmother found us, wrapped in our blanks with empty mugs and eyes glued to the TV.

To this day, it remains one of my fondest childhood memories.