Day 9: Your Earliest Memory

This challenge has been fun so far....and very time consuming but its good to exercise my brain like this! Another short one for today but I will be spending Sunday night and all day Monday on a bus so I should have time to get ahead on my blogs! I am sure I could recall an earlier memory but one that sticks out is when I was 5 and my mom and dad sat me and my sister down to tell us that we were going to be having a new brother. I cried. I guess it was an early indicator to my dislike of change. I don't remember to many to many other details of the big announcement but I think I was just confused as to what having a brother would mean. For all of my short life it had been just me and my twin sister, our parents, and our pups odie and rascal. What is the need to bring in a new species to the family? Even though at first I wasn't into the idea of having a brother I had a change of heart the second I held that huge baby in my arms for the first time! (He was a 9.5 pounder!) He had to grow up fast because his two sisters loved to tease him and dress him up like a doll! Mom always warned me to be careful because one day he would be bigger than me and then I wouldn't be able to beat up on him :-) She was right and in my last couple years of high school he shot up like a weed! I loved having him in my life and watching him grow up! I remember how he gave the most awesome speech about his life at his kindergarten graduation. The boy knew how to work a crowd :-) I would always be able to count on having my little brother to climb trees, ride bikes, play basketball in the driveway, and play barefoot soccer in the yard. One fun thing we used to do would be to build forts out of the couch cushions and when we got bored we would take the couch cushions and tie them around ourselves with belts and sashes and play sumo wrestler! It was hard to go away to school for my last 2 years of HS and then my years at Southern. I feel like I missed some pivotal growing up moments in his life! I loved being able to go to school with him during my last semester at Southern, better late than never! Having a brother has been awesome! Our brother sister relationship had its typical arguments and disagreements but without him, my life growing up would of been incomplete! Even though life has dealt its ups and downs in life nothing has been better than having him around. He is a good listener, awesome sports playing partner, and a good friend! I love that he has an active relationship with God and has really accepted him for his own. Nothing makes me prouder! I love my brother!