My little brother isn't so little anymore, and it's harder to handle than I ever thought it would be. When my brother was born and my parents brought him home from the hospital, I bawled because I wanted a sister. I even bit his finger when my mom was in the bathroom and asked me to keep an eye on him in his crib. He was only a few days old, and I was only three years old. (Don't worry, I went and hid and cried until my dad found me because I must've felt bad or something.) Growing up we were pretty close (or it seems that way because our mom was obsessed with pictures and made sure that he and I had a picture taken together at least once a day). I came up with his nickname "Geege", and it's stuck ever since. When we were young, we always joked that he should've been the girl and I should've been the boy. I was an all around tomboy, but Geege was kind of a baby. He was a Mama's boy where I was a Daddy's Girl, he shrieked and ran to the house when I caught salamanders and toads. There is one thing that I will never be able to take away from him though, he is an amazing athlete and was from the first day he picked up a bat.
Mom and dad made sure that him and I were both involved in as much as we could handle. We were in boy and girl scouts, we both played T-Ball as soon as we were old enough and we both played soccer as soon as we were old enough. When my brother, Jake decided to further his T-Ball career to Little League and then High School baseball, I stopped my career at the YMCA league. Jake played every sport under the sun. He played football, baseball, basketball, hockey and lacrosse. I found my passion in the outdoors with hunting and Jake found his in sports. For awhile, he enjoyed hunting with my dad and I until it started interfering with his strongest passion: skiing.
Geege discovered skiing about five years ago and since then, he spends probably 5-6 days a week at Seven Springs Resort, which is only about twenty minutes from our house. He got into filming and he's insanely talented at it. He's well known in our area as "Jake Tha Dug" and has made countless friends thru filming. He even had the opportunity to travel to Liberty University in Virginia to film an amateur professional skier who personally asked Geege to film for him.
Although Geege has been prone to injury since he was two and jumped off the stairs, then proceeded to tell the doctor that he thought he was "Spiderman but couldn't fly" when they did an X-Ray to find that his foot was broken. After that he broke his elbow, his hand, his fingers, had countless concussions and stitches and even just recently had major knee surgery. When he was in kindergarten, he got his tonsils out and instead of healing like the other 999,999 kids out of a million, he hemorrhaged and we almost lost him (on my 9th birthday, at my 9th birthday party slumber party with my four closest girlfriends of the time). He was life-flighted to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh after my parents got him to the Latrobe Hospital and needed a large blood transfusion. He spent a few days in ICU and then a few days in a normal room after that. But through everything that the kid has been thru, he's had a great attitude and an unreal pain tolerance.
Without a doubt I believe that as siblings grow up they grow together. I never imagined that the kid who pulled out my hair wrap, leaving me with a quarter sized bald spot the week before I started Kindergarten would turn into my best friend. Especially after I gave him a goose egg and potential concussion with the car door when we were fighting for shotgun once. Geege and I have been fighting from day 1, and we definitely still have our days, but the kid is my blood. At the end of the day, he will be there when nobody else is. He's stuck with me as his sister forever, to hate the girls he brings home and slap him back to reality when he needs it.
