From Emily~ (Part 1)

I remember when I was about 6 or 7 and Jennie and I would fight all the time. I assume this is pretty standard for sisters. I also remembering my dad having a conversation with me how when Jennie and I both grown up a bit, that we would probably be really good friends, and I would be so glad to have a sister. Of course I didn’t believe him at all.

Well about 6 years later our lives had changed a lot. We had moved across the country from Colorado to Maryland, and our parents were no longer married, our parents had been separated for a number of years. We were just embarking on a completely new adventure: our mom dating!

While in retrospect our mom admits that she dated her first boyfriend way too long, and as irritating as it was for me and Jennie to have him around all the time, as sisters we grew a lot. I feel like this was the beginning of what my dad had been talking about. Instead of Jennie and I kind of getting a long and fighting a lot, I started to really see how cool Jennie was, and how grateful I was to have her as my sister.

So a couple of my memories from this year in Jennie’s life was her bluntness. One Saturday my mom’s boyfriend was making pancakes, and not going a great job with it. They were getting burned and not turning out very well. Jennie in very direct style for a 9 year-old stated, “My dad makes really good pancakes”, and then the boyfriend had the brilliance to respond, “Well, let’s all clap for your dad!”

Jennie and I would get really irritated with the boyfriend, but found a whole new joy in eachother. We started talking in ob all the time. We didn’t do it to irritate the boyfriend, more because we wanted to have private conversations, but later when we found out that it irritated him, that definitely didn’t deter us.

I remember when we had the blizzard and got snowed in with the boyfriend, and Jennie and I started digging out our cul-de-sac because we wanted him gone. While I am not sad that this boyfriend is no longer apart of our life, I am grateful for how close Jennie and I got, and I got a glimpse of what my dad was talking about, that my sister would really be a great friend.