Does anyone have an older sibling that still treats them like they are five? Okay that’s me and I have three of them.
I love my older sisters, but they have always been my older sisters. It started when they were born first.
I always got the hand-me-downs. By the time I got the hoola hoop, it
was square. When I got the easy bake oven, it had e-coli. And when I
finally got the Ken and Barbie doll, they were already in a mid-life
crisis.
Well, sometimes my oldest sister would watch us three younger sisters.
My mom would give us four dolls and a stack of saltine crackers for a
snack. She would of course decide when it was time to feed us. We would
all sit there like baby robins in a nest with our mouths open waiting
for her to drop something in our mouths – so she would ask if we wanted
the cracker with or without salt. If we wanted it without salt she
would take a cracker and lick the salt off and then hand it to us. It
took the meaning of sodium free to a whole new level.
The 7-up Slurpee that we all shared... Well, that is why I have emotional backwash to this day.
How many of your remember when jelly came in those little Flintstone
glasses? The neat thing was when you were done with the jelly – then you
could wash the little glass jar and then use it at the table as a
glass – if you ate enough jelly you could furnish a whole set -- even
Martha Stewart hadn’t thought of that. One day I accidentally broke one
– and one of my older sisters said, "How come can’t we keep anything
nice around here?"
I love being the youngest in the family but some people don't like
their birth order. The problem? The problem is all those books out
there about birth order. And, all of us believe it and live by it as
though it were all true.
Well, I say if you don't like your order in the family why not change it so you end up where really want to be?
How can that be done? Well, what do you do if you didn’t like your
first, middle or last name? You’d go to court and have it changed.
Want
to be first born? The youngest? Disappear in the middle? Go on the
Web, find a site created by lawyers to change your birth order,
download the forms, and voila! You’re now top of the heap and can run
the universe. Or, if you’re now the baby of the family you can stomp
your feet, get big alligator tears and threaten to go tell Mom and Dad
even if you are 38.
To change your birth order you might try telling people the hospital
got the ink footprints mixed up and actually you were born a decade
before your oldest sister who looks nine years older than you. You can
then go over to your (former) oldest sister’s home, knock on her door,
and shout, “Give me back my make-up purse! Who said you could borrow it
in the first place? And don’t let me ever find you in my bathroom
again!”
Or,
finally, to change your birth order go to HighSchoolReunion.com and
use Photoshop to insert your own picture into the class of ’86 where
your brother’s face used to be. The amazing result? Suddenly, you’re
now Wally Cleaver and he’s the Beaver. Even Ward and June are too old
to go ape over something like that.
Finally, remember birth order begins to repeat itself in large families
with every fourth child. This is mainly because no birth order book
has more than four types of children so then by the fifth one the child
starts acting like the first one. If someone could think of another
chapter it would likely transform families overnight.
Birth order, according to some authors, affects everything about your
life. It affects whether or not you have asthma, what type of exercise
program you should undertake and whether the leaves turn in your front
yard turn to autumn colors before or after others in your family.
Basically if you know about birth order, you don't need to know anything else. And why should you?
You already have a brother who knows everything for you.
