Lovin' Life with My Little Bro Ethan

Ethan is my little brother. He is my only little brother. He is spoiled rotten, and I hate to say it, but I spoil him too. There's just something about him that everyone loves. He just graduated this week, and I thought that deserved a post for our years growing up together. Ethan is good at absolutely everything he does. Really good. So while he is quite cocky and annoying sometimes, its hard to tell him to pipe down, when he really is as good as he thinks he is. Don't ever tell him I said that. He learned quicker, had faster reflexes, and was brighter in almost everything we competed in. Somehow, I don't think I ever really resented it though--it was just who he is. In a recent conversation we were talking about something he was struggling with, and I was taking the whole thing quite lightly. Until it hit me, quite suddenly, that at the exact same age I had been going through the exact same situation. Poor kid.  And that made me realize how suddenly we've grown up. Thanks Ethan, for all the wonderful years where you were my best friend no matter where we lived or moved, and for those rare moments later in our teenage years where we really connected and had some great times.

This is my little brother Ethan, and myself. We were a little crazy sometimes. He is two years younger than me---and the source of many, MANY memories of my childhood. I don't really know what we were doing in the picture above---but it was fun, let me tell ya.
This is one of my favorite pictures of Ethan and me. It was as we were leaving for the bus stop, the one year we went to the same school at South Ogden Junior High, and mom made us stop cause she thought we looked cute. I'm so glad she did.This picture shows that we loved each other from the very beginnings of our existence....and that he was mostly always the same size as me. I remember that we were best friends for quite a while when we were small. We were always very different though. I remember when we were little and lived in Ogden, he knew an old lady across the street would give him a treat if he knocked on her door, but I always was too nervous, and thought it was rude to take advantage....but Ethan went over there all the time---and sometimes he brought me back treats too.This is a picture of Ethan and I when we were in YM/YW together, and dad was the YM President...Good times.We were at a youth conference and  that river was actually off limits, cause it was too fast-flowing, or something ridiculous like that. Pretty sure Ethan, Brach, Aleesha, and myself played in it every day. Maybe not the best of examples, but it sure was a lot of fun.I have lots of great memories with Ethan. He had an old bike that had pegs on it. We used to ride it together to school at Longfellow Elementary in Minot, North Dakota. I think we had about 12 different ways to ride one bike together. My favorite was sitting back to back, him riding, and me with my feet on the pegs watching everything go by backwards. I also remember that when we finally had two bikes, he used to ride behind me and make our wheels hit, and it always scared me. One time on the way home from school he did that and both our bikes flipped and we landed really hard---it was an amazing crash really. I remember wanting to be mad, but he was smiling as he stood up and we both burst out laughing. Kinda hard to be mad after that. We rode our bikes all over Minot. Several times to buy 25 cent candy at the little corner store, we'd ride through Oak Park, and Nubbin Park, and we'd even ride our bike all the way out to the gas station on the way to where our horses were kept out of town.

I also remember all the games we played. Ethan was always my protector and I was always the one protected. I was the pioneer mother, and he was the one who found food, or I was protected from the Indians, or all sorts of things. I remember really clearly one time playing firefighters on the trampoline, and every time you bounced, it took you up a floor to blow out the fire. It was so vivid in my mind that I still remember what the dilapidated building, smoldering in flames, looked like in my head. 

I also remember playing spies a lot too. We used to borrow mom's walkie talkies and tour the neighborhood together. We fit in a little cupboard underneath the kitchen sink, and we'd slide into it, and keep one another posted on what was happening in the Rasmussen household. We also had a secret lab in his room downstairs where we made computers out of  shoe boxes and mom helped us laminate fingerprinted business cards. It was hi-tech and I LOVED playing it with him.
As we got older, I remember picking his smelly self up from football, wrestling, or track and listening to what he had to say from his day. I remember one time I picked him up and I was crying from a song that was playing on the radio, and his face was so hilarious, cause he didn't realize that that was all that was wrong!
One of the most terrible days of my life was when I got a call while working at JCPenney, and they told me Ethan was in Ogden, at the hospital, and had been hurt in football. Seeing his cocky, nothing-can-hurt-me self in a hospital bed was very scary. I brought him my phone charger, a shake, and a book. We chatted a good portion of the night actually. Luckily, he was all right, and could still play football. A few months later I was at the game he got hurt really bad. I went down to the field at half time to see if he was all right. I was bawling before I even said a word, and he said "why did you come down here?" I wanted to tell him that I knew it was his dream, and that I couldn't imagine him without football at the moment, and---I said "I don't know." and gave him a big hug.

This picture is the morning after Ethan's first prom, and my last. We both look pretty beat, but it was fun to be going to the same dance as my little brother.

So Ethan was pretty much my closest friend throughout my childhood. As we got older, we had other friends we were probably closer with--but we still had moments when we would hit it off, have a great time, and talk about our lives with one another, and I still cherish those moments---even if he is an ornery teenager jock now.




This is a picture of a mermaid we spent SIX HOURS working on one day in North Dakota. That river brings back loads of memories--most of them with Ethan. We were so proud. The other one is Ethan and I with some of our oldest nieces and nephews, now those two are about the same age as we were when we were holding them. Crazy.

       

Ethan and I started a lot of things together:swimming lessons, t-ball, new schools, we had the same piano teachers, the same church leaders. It was fun to have someone there to go through life with. Especially someone who always convinced you to drive him home between sacrament meeting and priesthood to snack on the brownies left on the counter. So delish. And so fun.

Ethan is a ornery kid now, who doesn't talk to me much cause he has a girlfriend---but he still lets me punch his stomach every time I come home to visit, and he still shows me where all the snacks are. His motto's are something along the lines of "I don't wear a watch, I decide what time it is." He tells everyone that "He'll decide" and its a huge family joke now. But even though he thinks he knows everything about the world--thats kinda part of his charm. As much as I worry about this kid, I know he is an amazing person, and I am really glad I got to spend my childhood with him. Congrats on the graduation Ethan, and good luck on the next crazy years of your life, cause right now, all I got to say is young single adult life is crazy, fun, busy, and hard. But you love it, and you'll live it up.