Oh, where to begin? The oldest is 31, then 25 (nearly 26), then 21 (congrats!), and then 19. I’m the youngest of us all. You all hated me for that for forever. I got away with pretty much everything, and I’m 99.9 percent positive I blamed whatever it is that I did on at least one of you. Every. Single. Time. My favorite was when I tripped over an extension cord and totally blamed John Robert for it. You got in so much trouble. I think. I can’t remember because I was, like, 5 years old, but you never let me forget that story. Well, we’ve come a long ways since then, but a few rules still stand to this day: aka, The Big Boy Rule.

I’m pretty sure this was the first rule I ever learned, and John, you made sure I knew it by heart. You’re 12 years older than me and a dude. Undoubtedly, you were stronger than my 5-year-old self. I may have outgrown you in fifth grade (that was a good day), but I have no doubt you could still wrestle me to the ground in two seconds flat. You taught me that, if I wanted to play with you, I had to be able to take whatever I dished out: so if I hit you, you got to hit me with your own strength and speed. Basically, if all four of us were wrestling on the bed, I wasn’t allowed to cry if I accidentally got punched in the face. Which was often. And I cried. And you always looked me dead in the eye with that warning look on your face because you did not tolerate cry babies. I always immediately shut up, (or I think I did, but in all likelihood I probably just kept crying and got Mom and Dad).

And Alina, you taught me never to tattle. You taught me the hard way, too. I’ll never forget when you convinced me that I was your slave for three months before Mom found out. I got you milk, made you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and countless other things. When I finally told Mom I was your slave, you got in trouble, then convinced me I was your slave for six more months because she found out. You were really good at convincing me and Briana that you weren’t who we thought you were. You were, in no particular order, not our sister, an elf from Santa Claus, a witch, and a fairy. The elf one was good. We had to do everything you said, or you’d give a bad report to Santa and we wouldn’t get presents. Not to say that I didn’t get my vengeance. R.I.P Barbie Horseback Riding video-game. It served you well until a pencil found its way through it.

Briana, you were just a good sister. You never really did anything to me. We always got along really well, and I think we fought once in public and all our friends just kind of stared at us because we never fought. The best thing we did was (actually we still do this) when we'd dance to "Once Upon A Dream" from Sleeping Beauty. I'm always the guy because I'm five foot eleven, and you barely brush five foot two. Mostly, we suffered through Alina’s torment together. You also got her back once. I will never forget the murderous look on Mom’s face when you told her that her spankings didn’t really hurt... while she was in the middle of spanking Alina. I will also never forget the look on Alina’s face. If looks could kill, you’d have been dead when you were eight. Then again, you’ve had a couple near death experiences and survived: the little TV fell into the bathtub, run over by a four-wheeler, going head-first into a ditch full of thorns, falling off a zip-line onto dry ground instead of the water, etc. Yet I’m the one who got a broken arm! Unbelievable.

You all taught me a lot of things growing up, but my favorite thing isn’t everything I learned, like never letting John drive the boat while we tube behind it on the lake. It’s when we all get together and relive all of the greatest moments of our childhoods, like that time I was trying to jump on your back, John Robert, (without you knowing) from the top of Mom’s bed, and you moved just in time. Instead of sailing onto your back like a monkey, I face planted the wooden dresser, and literally, all you did was laugh at me while I cried. Like the time(s) Briana, Alina and I would jump from the stairs leading to John’s bedroom onto our mattress and trying not scrape our heads on the ceiling. Remember when ‘A’ was for Afraid, ‘B’ was for Brave, and ‘C’ was for Coward? Bri, you always got voted to be the one to crawl under the house, check on Mom in the pitch dark after watching Signs for the first time, and literally anything else that remotely scared us. When we’d all go to every Harry Potter midnight premiere together, from The Sorcerer’s Stone to Deathly Hallows Part II, and, even better, when John Robert made me fall in love with comics so much that I’m hunting an internship at Marvel or DC?

But even now, after all the years, we still manage to bond even though one is in Louisiana, one is in Colorado, and two are in Alabama. My favorite times of the year are right around the corner because it means we have a decent chance of all being in the same place at the same time. We get to crowd around the TV with the old Nintendo 64 playing Diddy Kong Racing or James Bond: The World Is Not Enough. As we play "Push N Shove", we relive all our favorite memories of childhood with Mom, Dad and Uncle Alton, along with whoever else is unfortunate enough to have been dragged along to the holidays.

So, thank you. Thank you for everything you taught me, everything we’ve shared, and everything we will continue to do together. You’re the best siblings anyone could ever ask for, and thank goodness you don’t belong to another family because they’d probably give you up for adoption in the first five minutes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯