Big Sister is Watching

AttachedMama here to guest blog for Alice today. To introduce myself, I am Alice's big sister, Dizzy. Alice and I are opposites in many ways. Growing up, she was always known as the "pretty one", while I was the "smart one".

Really, you could just as easily have called us the "one who cares enough to spend more than five minutes on her appearance in the morning" and the "one who knows how to lie to teachers and do a decent job on projects at 5 in the morning the day they're due so she can skip school and no one will care". The ironic part is that now I'm the one who is married and she is the one with the high-paying corporate job. So much for labels.

I like to think I was a good big sister. I tried to be helpful and answer Alice's many questions patiently, if not always honestly. For instance, the time she asked me why two of the knobs in the middle of the stove elements were blue, and two were red. I told her the blue ones were cold and the red ones were hot.

Alice was a good little sister too. When we were in the ER later waiting for Alice to be treated for the second-degree burns on her hand, she neglected to mention that she had been touching the burner to find out if it was really cold.

Though we sometimes fought like cats and dogs growing up (quite literally, I have a scar on my arm still), we were friends too. We shared a room for a long time, and our father gave us a ridiculously early bedtime (my cousins still tease him about sending us to bed at 9pm while on vacation and we were both teenagers). So early, that many nights we could sit and read long after lights out, simply because the sun was still out.

In the winter when it was too dark to read, but we weren't tired yet, we would crawl into bed together and whisper and giggle. We would watch for the light in the hall that told us we'd been too loud and Dad was coming, and jump into our own beds to pretend we were sleeping. We even made up our own Morse code, thinking that tapping it out on the dresser in between our beds would be quieter than the whispering. (It wasn't, though it did take Dad some time to figure out where the tapping was coming from.)

We both went to a French Immersion school and could speak French fluently. We used this to our advantage when meeting new people in order to talk right in front of them without their understanding what we were saying. I remember some vacations when we would meet new kids and start talking French to each other while playing. We weren't always saying bad things (though it was always fun to make fun of others when they had no clue what you were saying), so we didn't understand why it bothered the other kids so much. E-way ere-way also-hay uent-flay in-hay ig-Pay atin-Lay. What can I say, we're a multi-talented family.

I was thrilled when she shared her blog with me. I moved to BC eight years ago, but we still keep in touch via MSN and e-mail. Lately, many of our conversations center around me trying to convince her that Vancouver or Victoria are infinitely better places to live than Calgary. I'm not sure if I will ever convince her (though seriously, who would choose that over this), but if I can't make fun of her in person, at least I can do it through the comments on her blog.