Walkway and Teenage Boys

As I may have mentioned, my 18-year-old brother stayed with us for some time this summer. While he was here I definitely had moments of, "Oh my god--I'm going to have three of these!?!" M, E and Z loved every minute and learned lots of new things--rave dancing, fist bumping, saying "Hi Five" like Borat, phrases like, "what's kicking? chilling hard."

And I got this:



A walkway from my front door to the driveway, which I've been wanting for years. I still have to rake soil between the rocks, encourage moss to grow (apparently this requires a flat beer and a blender), and get rid of the piles of leftover sand, gravel and rocks in the driveway. But, the heavy lifting has been done, and I'm pretty psyched.

It was amusing to hear his regular conversations with our mom ("I'm an adult!") and not so amusing to hear parenting advice (seriously?), and his moping around being bored made me want to scream (yes of course I understand that he's removed from his friends and his usual things to do, and that he didn't have full-time work the whole time he was here, but since every minute of my day is scheduled with more things than I can get to...I found it hard to be sympathetic). A week of roofing with C was a pretty good cure for this syndrome.

I also had to buy and cook about twice as much food, but he did say my cooking is "bomb-digity" (despite the lack of meat), which is praise my own brood would never bestow on me...and he even cooked for us a few times.

I was a senior in high school when this youngest brother was born, then I went away to college and moved to Maine, so I haven't spent a lot of time with him and it was nice to get to know him finally after all these years.