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Three of my favorite people share a birthday:

My baby sister, T-da.  Formerly known as Dawn.

It’s like one day she went from a gawky, hard-to-relate-to-tween to an independent, smart, funny, Friend.  You should all be so lucky to have a sister as awesome as she is.  She’s spent many a night taking care of my babies (even when they were infants and getting up three times a night) or jumping in her car to help out in crisis situations.  And…well…she’s just gorgeous.  There’s that, too.

Obviously, that’s not a character quality but…well…you know.  And it just occurred to me that I have never shared her Absolutely Gorgeous Wedding Pictures.  Oh well, another post, another day.

And as to the other two birthdays…well…here you go.

Yeah, I know.  I’m going all FILM CAMERA on you.  But, sadly, it’s one of the few pictures I have of the two of them where they’re both smiling and not trying to out-stern each other.  My husband, Bryan, is on the left and his twin (duh) brother, Brandon is on the right.

Now, I know that this is kind of a downer but many of you know that in 2003, Brandon died.  And from that point on, the nature of Bryan’s birthday has changed.  It was once an opportunity to get together with family and friends. laugh, tease and have fun.  Now, it is still all of that but with a undertone of nostalgia, memories and the deep, abiding timbre of sadness.  But, there it is.  It’s a time when it hits that he’s not here any more and even though it’s been almost 7 years now, we still catch ourselves thinking he’s still going to snatch the last piece of red velvet cake.  Our family has changed so much since he died that it’s hard to imagine him involved in some ways.  I mean that in that he never got to meet our kids.  He never got to see his parents in their grandparent role.  He never got to see Bryan as a father.  But man, what I would give for him to be able to walk back in (late, as usual) and make our lives whole again.

So, 35.  It’s hard to believe that Bryan is there already.  It’s harder to believe that Brandon’s not with him.  But life goes on.  And even with the ever-present ache of his loss, Bryan manages to drag himself out of the doldrums and eat cake.  He’s lost a lot, but he sure does have a lot, too.  Happy Birthday, Babe.

It’s amazing the conversations that occur when two Moms are  stuck in a 30 minute car rider line together.

The other day, a friend and I were discussing how sucky it is that you only have control over your child’s behavior to a certain age.  And then you have control over their behavior to a certain degree but it gets less and less as the years go on.  We were talking while her son, who is 5 was playing with Malyn, who is 4.  As we were watching them play, I casually mentioned that it’s scary to think that one day, we will be talking with our kids about sex.  And we all know that most people under the age of 24 are too stupid/horny to consider sex in a rational way.  As in sex = (possibly) baby.

I said, “You know, one day *I* could be the Mom to that 15 year old teenage girl who walks in with a pregnancy test and says, ‘I’m pregnant!’”

We sat mulling over that one for a minute before she finally said, “And you know…MY SON could be the father!”

And we both snickered.  And died a little inside.  Then he threw a rock at Malyn and it was all good.  (Okay, so he didn’t really but he probably wanted to.)

So I was telling this story to my best friend and we were trying to decide how we were going to handle the whole sex talk.

{Aside: We live in The South.  There are three or four churches within a mile of my house.  Possibly more.  Mostly people around here handle it strictly in terms of “you do it and die”, “you need to wait to get married”, or “ABSTINENCE IS THE ONLY WAY” if there is any discussion at all.   Even though half of them were fooling around in the car after the football games in high school.  I have No Idea why parents fail to remember the generally stupidity, thoughtlessness and hormonal drives of teenagers.  My thought process goes something like this; if you DID have sex before marriage/significant relationship, if you WANTED to have sex before marriage/significant relationship, if you crossed the line before marriage/significant relationship then why in the HELL would you think your kid isn’t going to?}

So, well, after a brief stop in RantVille, we’ll head back to my discussion with Cheyenne.

Me: Well, I think Malyn is just going to take a ‘vitamin’ until she’s out of college.

Cheyenne: Yea, do you think they come in Flintstone shapes?  (Our family’s vitamin of choice.)   Or gummy shapes? (Her family’s.)

Me:  I don’t know but that’s a GENIUS IDEA!  We could be BILLIONAIRES!

Cheyenne:  Imagine the hate we would for marketing a cherry-flavored birth control pill.

Gosh, I love that girl.

In fact, Cheyenne had company last week and was pretty much unable to talk more than a minute here and there for the entire week and I swear, Bryan started getting all pissy because Cheyenne wasn’t around to use up my words.  It’s like he walked home to a barrage of my inane chatter and finally, he turned to me and said, “Cheyenne’s going to have to lose the house guests or she’s going to GAIN one.”

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On a totally unrelated note, I was struck by the irony (?) in this situation the other day.

I had banned Drew from the TV because his brains were starting to melt out of his ears.  But I was desperately urging my computer to download some school-approved educational software games.  Go figure.