Living Out Loud volume 18: My brother's keeper

Ian is a little over eight months old now and the ladies at day care have started asking if he's going to have any siblings. There are several other babies in the room who have older brothers or sisters in the neighboring classrooms and I could see that in some cases they are that close together. And while we're interested in Ian having at least one sibling, we're not really ready to start on that quite yet. Both of us have brothers that are at least five years apart from us (his younger, mine both older). It seems normal to us. But as I look at my own life I'm not sure I want to be 38 with a newborn.

Both of my parents have siblings and it's been interesting to see their relationships as they've all grown up and now become of old people. They share a common bond of family and even in their adult interactions you can see currents of how they were as kids. There's the bossy one and the whiny one and the smart ass.

I've even heard someone ask, "do you think I could buy a brother?" after dealing in frustration with the brother fate dealt.

So this brings me to our theme for Living Out Loud. I'm way behind and I'm sure some of you wondered if there would even be an LOL this month. But I knew we wouldn't want it due on July 4 anyways, so I kinda knew I had an extra week to procrastinate. Forgive me, I have a clingy eight-month-old at home so I have to go to Panera to write blog posts.

Tell us about your siblings. Do you wish you had more or less of them? Has your relationship with them changed over the years? For better or for worse? If you're an only child, are you happy about that or do you wish you had a brother or sister around? In either case are there those who fill the space of a sibling you "never had" within your circle of friends? Did your relationship with your siblings affect your ideas on kids of your own? What qualities do you think that make you a good sibling to your family (either actual or chosen)?

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, July 11th (the second Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Recap of Living Out Loud volume 17: All in the family

Whew, another month has flown by and this one has been particularly busy for me (note the distinct lack of updates lately). But it's always good to see my gang of LOLers still pull through for me. These were all a joy to read! Rachel's The rascal's family I love that nickname, very clever. And it's amazing how history can repeat itself.

Peggy's It's All Relative I love looking at pictures of kids and comparing them to adults. My brother and I look almost identical, I think. I keep meaning to get baby pictures of me and Rich and our brothers to see who Ian favors.

Candice's Learning how to love and cry Ah, postpartum hormones. My parents have never been overly emotional until recently so we've never had to deal with "fuzzy screens" but I'm finding myself more empathetic to them every day now as a parent.

Ruth's Chew It Up Good There is a famous family recording of my yelling "LOOK WHAT HE BRANG ME!" on Christmas morning, and yet I still manage to command the English language now. :) And yeah, heredity can sometimes feel like a trap and other times like a warm blanket.

Megan's Too Much Fun? Not Mom I laughed about her collecting ex-boyfriends. I tend to collect Rich's ex-girlfriends so I can empathize. And now I want to hang out with your mom.

SuziCate's Does The Apple Really Fall That Far From The Tree? Wow your parents really do look alike. And my mother always used to hear how beautiful her sister was and how she had such a sweet personality. So yeah, we understand that whole ugly duckling thing.

Jessica's Family resemblance I'm fascinated how you and your sister look so different but I can see both of your parents in you, both temperament and features. As for Tommy, I have a hard time pinning any particular features to one or the other of you. He's a little potpourri of you both. :)

And my own Nurturing my nature

I found this topic to be really fun to read, if difficult to get started writing about. I attribute that to my own writers block of sorts these days, though. I love looking at pictures of people and many of you offered up a ton to peruse. I also love to see physical characteristics and personality traits grow in people.

This month I choose Candice as our winner. I admit to having a soft spot for her as a new mother and seeing how she's found a new quality in herself she didn't think was there really stuck with me. Candice will receive a $25 Amazon gift certificate as her prize, but you all receive my eternal thanks for playing along with me this month.

I'm already churning up an idea for our next theme (as well as several other blog posts that have been percolating) so stay tuned!

Nurturing my nature

"My parents are awesome. They just drive me crazy, you know?"- co-worker, leaving to clean his apartment before his parents showed up to visit

There are many aspects, mostly good, to living so close to ones immediate family. For example, today started with a text message from my brother requesting caulk while we were out and led to a long discussion about shower curtain designs followed by my taking a perfectly good shower curtain and cutting it up to turn it into a new shower curtain design. It would (maybe) make more sense if you were there. Really it would only make sense if you were part or our family's sub-culture.

There was an interesting segment on Momversation about if your child's personality comes from Nature or Nuture (warning: video auto plays). I've wondered about that a lot myself these days, particularly as I've watched Ian develop his own little beginnings of a personality. It's also come to light as I've developed an adult friendship with my cousin. We had pretty different childhoods from pretty opposite parents in many ways (other than the important ones of both coming from homes where we were loved and cared for). Yet there are lots of things she and I share now as adults that she keeps chalking up to "genetics". She's an only child and I have two siblings. She was raised Catholic and we never went to any churches in our family. She grew up in a manicured neighborhood of Virginia Beach while we never left our little rough around the edges area of Ocean View. My father is stubborn to a fault and her mother seems to carry the lion's share of stubbornness in their family. And yet here we are decades later finding out that we're really not so different after all.

For most of my life, I've felt like I was a Daddy's girl. Mom always seemed to be the willow in our family, accommodating the strong winds of my father's opinions. And as a child, I remember clinging to those strong opinions as if they were gospel. They would guide me through my life and help me make decisions.

But now, I feel more in the middle. Part of that has been Daddy's depression making him more irrational and harder to relate to. There is just so much that he finds negative, it can be hard to really rally behind all those opinions. It's exhausting.

Mom, however, is hopeful in spite of everything. I can't remember who, but someone told her incredulously once that she was so happy and she didn't have anything! She can find the sunbeam in any cloudy day, and also have the tenacity to weather the storms until that sunbeam makes an appearance. My father has said on many occasions that if she had his physical strength, she'd be dangerous because she can accomplish so much just from sheer will.

I see myself as a blend of the two of them, both nature and nurture. I have Dad's fair skin and freckles but I have Mom's smile. I yell like my father and I hum just like my mother. My feet and hands are slender like my mother's and the rest of me is just a bit too tall like my father.

I have spent inordinate amounts of time tending to our own elderly pets, after watching the years my father cared for his dying cat, feeding him with a syringe and bathing him and tending to his grave. When Loki had the liver cancer and was sent home to die, I called my father in tears because he was the only one I trusted to tell me it was the right time to take my cat back to the vet and be put to sleep. I still worry, just like Dad would, about the woman that I didn't stop to help off the highway because I'd already past her and would have had to cross three lanes of traffic. I believe firmly that cats have no business being on kitchen counters or other eating surfaces. I do all these things because I'm Daddy's girl.

I send little gifts to friends for no good reason because my mother would come home with something for a neighbor or friend with no reason other than it was perfect for them. I lie in bed with Ian as he's falling asleep, rubbing his back to the point where I feel like I'm about to fade away until he stirs and it rallies me to rub his back some more. I do this now because I remember being the kid in my mother's bed as she rubbed my back and when she started to fall asleep I would wiggle just enough to keep her going. I get anxious whenever Rich starts to look for something in my stuff, and parrot my mother's pleas of "please don't mess in my goodies!" And I take home a shower curtain from my brother's house to sew it into a new curtain for the window in his bathroom. I do all these things because I'm Mom's daughter.

My parents are awesome and I can only hope Ian will think the same of Rich and I, even if we drive him crazy.