All about my brother

Last weekend our family of four headed down to San Diego to spend Easter weekend with my parents, my brother and his girlfriend. Did you know that I had a brother? I don’t talk about him much, but today I figured I’d print an embarrassing picture of him on the Internet, so everyone can see how much he resembled Benjamin Button when he was six. (Also, check it out, we totally have the same hairstyle – I guess Short Uneven Bangs was a huge look in 1986 - at least in whatever style magazine my mother was reading.)

My baby brother’s birthday is today. I can barely believe Matt is 30 because I still feel like I’m about 15, and that would make him 13, in which would make it 1995, which would mean I was perpetually adding sun-in to my hair in attempt to create “natural” blond streaks and wearing oversized flannel shirts, and man I’m glad he is 30 because that means I’m almost 32 wearing my hair in a ponytail, smelling like baby spit-up procrastinating on an editing assignment, but really I’m alternating between Facebook and Words with Friends. It also means I am no longer listening to Alanis Morissette, THANK GOD.

As the older sister, I have done some horrible things to Matt over the years. When he was two or three, I started dressing him up in my clothes, putting his hair in pigtails, smearing my mom’s lipstick over his face and pretending he was my new sister. I’m fairly certain this continued until he was four or five. It’s a miracle he’s become a strapping, well-adjusted, kind-hearted guy and not a self-tortured introvert who strangles kittens. He does still have a penchant for pink (oh, excused me salmon) colored shirts, though. And he totally can’t grow a beard.

Aside from posting these pictures (don’t you love these? I have no idea what we were doing in the above picture, perhaps gearing up a career as professional golfers? And yes, indeed I am wearing a Grover visor. Doesn’t it just rock the house?) I also sold Matt my used Hootie & the Blowfish CD in 1996 for more than I’d paid for it, told him countless times that he was adopted (coming up with elaborate stories about his birth family), and convinced him that the dogs kibble was his lunch one day.  

These days I know that I am much more sentimental about the sibling relationship that I was in 1996. Siblings are your first friends, and Matthew was mine. We may have not always gotten along, and he may have embarrassed me (and I him, although I think that’s hard to believe) on more than one occasion. But I am so fiercely proud my little brother, and the person that he’s become. 

(What, you don’t wear glittered top hats and paper crowns on a random Saturday afternoon?)