Oh, Brother

You guys have no idea how close I am to calling Stacy in for this one. I. Am. Pooped. For the past couple nights, I have not slept well at all, and I just polished off a big burger, fries and scoop of vanilla sundae at dinner. I'm basically comatose. But, we must press on, folks. We must.

After one of the world's longest hump days at work, I went and had some din-din with my family at Hazeltine. What's the occasion, you ask? Tonight officially kicks of the "Month of Too Many Birthdays" in my family. We've got, at my last count, 6 birthdays in a month. Tonight was Perek's birthday (HBD, Bro!) so we kicked off the Birthday Season in style.

We were all sitting there, digesting the nummy food, when Perek pointed towards the melting ice cream in front of him. "What did we used to call that?" he asked. I got this big grin on my face and said "Mmm. Snake Soup." He and I would build forts and sit in there with big bowls of ice cream, and stir it and stir it until the ice cream totally melted. We'd add "goat's eyeballs" and "tongue of newt" and then slurp it up. Gross. Plus, hello Dummies? We didn't even put SNAKE in Snake Soup. Idiots.

Anyway, that particular memory prompted me to recall many other joyous and possibly life-scarring memories about him and me growing up.

* We used to have one of those arcade basketball games in our basement - you know, the ones with two baskets, and you shoot baskets for like 45 seconds or something. Anyway, Perek was like 12, and was in the basement shootin' hoops. Alone. I crept down the stairs, snuck around the corner, jumped out behind him and screamed "BOOOOOOOO!" He screamed bloody murder, collapsed to the ground, cried, and basically hyperventilated for a minute. I haven't laughed that hard in a very long time.

* My sisters taught Perek the wrong colors growing up. We also gave him erroneous pronunciations of words like Japan.

* He used to not eat food if anyone "breathed on it". Once we discovered that, we'd blow all over his food and laugh and laugh and laugh while he'd cry and refuse to eat.

* The most well-known quote in my family was "They're just jealous." My mom would say that to Perek anytime we'd pick on him, which was daily. When we made fun of him for having a near-life-size poster of himself playing soccer in his own room, my mom hugged him to her and said "Oh Perek, they're just jealous". And that twerp would fake cry and stick his tongue out at us.

* Kids in the 80's were so much tougher than kids today. Perek and I would put on our "sleepers" - those awesomely frictiony footie pajamas - and shoot down our staircase on our butts. We'd skid down the stairs (which were only carpeted in the middle of each step) at light speed. And besides the wall, the only things keeping us "safe" were the precariously sharp wrought-iron banisters lining one side. The sliding was very fun. The smashing into the banister was NOT fun.

* Do you guys remember the music in the Sega game Sonic? AWESOME. We'd play the game and every once in awhile, something in the wordless music just made us blurt out a line and we'd write songs based on that first, impetuous line. The lines made no sense together, but somehow the words came to us like they just FIT. When we were at Geo's cabin a few months ago, Perek and flipped on Sonic to see if we could remember any words. The ones we remembered were gems such as "Must have been some magic.....must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found", "duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh, we'll take the freeway up!" and "ba ba da ba ba da ba What are we gonna dooooo?" What? Horrible lyrics. I hope I can remember them forever though.

It was never dull growing up in a house with so many kids, but Perek was the ONLY one I could, like, preside over because he is the only one younger than me. And I would like to think I took that responsibility seriously. Okay, so YES, he's younger than me and he's married and a home owner way before I am, but that doesn't matter. I will always be the one who reminds him, in public, that he didn't wear jeans until he was 15 AND I was the one who urged him to get his first "cool kid haircut". Yeah, you're welcome, bro ham. Happy Birthday, Perek!