Growing up I hated playing the "How many siblings do you have" game, evolving from the wonder of elementary school kids to the snickering through middle school, all the way to the crude high school jokes. My favorite response was the classic "Man, your parents were busy". Well yeah, they were trying to raise eight kids and that is a feat within itself. Yes, I have eight siblings, but I have just one full-blooded sister.
Let me break it down for you: Both of my parents had previous marriages which yielded each of them a boy and a girl.They divorced, met each other, and got married bringing our count up to four kids. They had me and my older sister, my fore-mentioned full-blooded sister, and years later we adopted my two younger brothers rounding us out to a nice eight.
Things within our family were always interesting and exciting. Family gatherings were always at least fifteen people, we rarely went out to eat due to the lack of space in restaurants, and we always had four kids living at home at the same time. It's cute when I go visit other people's houses and they complain about how "crazy" their family is. If they saw half of what our family was like they would question the true definition of that word.
Each of them has taught me something different about the world which is in part due to their occupations. My oldest sister Alysha, the mother of my three beautiful nieces and handsome nephew, married to an Air Force Officer, has shown that home is wherever you want it to be; it does not have to be confined to one specific region. Jon, my oldest brother, is an ex-Marine and also created his own trucking business, has taught me that sometimes life gets hard, but you can always push through it and you’ll always have family there for you. My second-to-oldest sister Lauren has imparted the strength of being on time and organized through her years of being an attorney. My other older brother Chris, who is an amazing musician, artist, and photographer, has taught me how to perceive the beauty of the world through little things. My older sister Analyn continues to prove that no idea is too small and all people are important through her creation of an organization to help foreign exchange students; in fact, she’s the one who convinced me to attend my first mission trip to Guatemala. Joseph and Stephen, my two youngest brothers, have taught me how to overlook skin color and realize that family is not simply genetics.
Within every family is love and beauty; you just have to search for it. I understand that not all families are like mine, but in the end, family is family. Nothing can truly take away the love and memories that you've shared. This is for my siblings, for molding me into who I am today.
