Oh, Brothers.

[Josiah as Moriarty, Me as Irene, and Jeremiah as Sherlock]

 So... I just really like these gents a lot.

And, last night, we got to cosplay as some of my favorite characters.

It was **such** a blast!

Birth-order wise, I'm sandwiched between these two and I feel pretty lucky.

Some girls with brothers talk about how they toughened them up

or wrestled a lot or whatever.

Well, I stayed out of their wrestling.

[Instead, we spent a lot more time playing playmobile -

I always got to be the princess to their knight, soldier, pirate, etc.]

But we did grow up arguing discussing a lot

and I felt like I got toughened up mentally because of them.

And though they made me fight the hardest,

they also made me laugh the longest.

Now that we're all adults, pursuing different dreams and paths...

it makes me really grateful for all those heated debates, N64 games,

playmobile-filled Saturday mornings, nerdy jokes, 

YouTube marathons of HISHE and good music,

and lots and lots of laughter.

Plus, I think they are smashingly dapper!

Thank God for brothers.

fourteen.

So incredibly grateful for this guy:

[Josiah and I on graduation day 2012]

My brother Josiah is one of my absolute bestest friends!

Fourteen years ago today, he was handed a death sentence, a diagnoses of terminal lymphoma.

But God is so incredibly good and He interposed and gave Josiah life.

Fourteen years later, we are celebrating his graduation from college and now he's preparing to pack up his car and move off for grad school (which would be sad if it wasn't so exciting)

He is off to have some pretty amazing adventures and I'm so proud of him! But... I will miss him like the dickens!

Whether he's being silly, quoting disney movies, or cracking Boadicea jokes, Josiah can make me laugh like no one else.

[New Years 2012]

And it will be strange without him around.

[October 2011 - Husky homecoming with Dad's letterman blanket]

[September 2011 - Last, first day of school together]

[Jeremiah's MC graduation]

[Summer 2010 - a Summer visit to campus just before he started there]

Josiah, you've become such a deep person. No, not just in the sense that you can confuse mom with big sounding words in your (published =) articles. I mean that you are truly thoughtful, spirit-sensitive, knowledgeable, and compassionate. You have literally amazed me over the last several years by branching out to new types of people, working so incredibly hard, attaining things that seemed impossible. I'm so proud of you. And I'm so grateful for you!

Just wanted to take this day to appreciate who you are and the simple fact that you are here.

So grateful that God had plans for you on this earth that would take longer than 11 years to achieve. I'm so excited to see where those plans take you next.

Love you tons,

Samara

Last night I was talking about the upcoming Jane Eyre movie (which I'm stoked to see :), when my brother asked me who it was written by. After I told him the author was Charlotte Bronte, he said, "Who was that again?"

I started out, "Ok, so Charlotte was, obviously, a Bronte. There were 3 Bronte sisters--"

When he interrupted me and exclaimed, "--oh, like the Kardashians?"

grrrrr...

Once he noticed the glare on my face and my hand clenched in a fist, he laughed and asked, "Are you going to punch me?"

I didn't punch him, but he would have deserved it for such a dreadful degradation. I still can't believe he said that.