My Sister is the Best Sister

Today is my sister Liz's birthday and it is high time I shared all the reasons we should be celebrating her life.  I can't remember a single point in my life in which Liz didn't exist because she's 13 months younger than me.  As my mom tells it, Liz thought we were twins until I left for kindergarten; I don't remember that event but I remember feeling like a two-person Becka/Liz unit.  This is a great thing because I always had another person to adventure with.  We had adventures in sketchy apartments in Ogden, around the wide open spaces of Clinton, straight through high school and college and into adulthood.  The best part of it all is that we've become better friends with age.  I'm so grateful I've got a Liz, I hope you all have a person like that in your lives to love you and laugh with.

If I had to come up with my top five favorite things about Liz as we've aged together and they are as follows:

1. Childhood - Liz could make up names for everything.  I know it sounds weird, but one of my most prominent memories as a child was watching Liz give the best names to all of our stuffed animals.  I think it's a great combination of creativity and intuition.  It was awesome, but just a small part of the awesome play-time memories I have with my sister.  There were also bike riding misadventures to Antelope Island and family movie nights and some traumatizing room-cleaning episodes, but my childhood was probably a thousand times better because Liz was there.

2.  Adolescence - Liz the Fashionista.  In junior high Liz went through a serious Spice Girls craze.  We give her some flack for this because loving the Spice Girls was a serious commitment to outrageous fashion, but she handled it well.  Loving fashion was accompanied by a commitment to excellent hair, which has most recently manifested itself in a new super cute dark-colored cut, but it all started with bleach:

 I wish with all of my heart that I had a picture of her in her pink corduroy pants.  She dyed an entire load of laundry pink with those pants.  And she killed it in them.  She's still the most stylish person in our family and is the person I can trust most to tell whether I can pull off a new piece of clothing or not (for the record, she says I can't pull off pink but would look good with bangs.  I believe the first part and am skeptical of the second).  

3.  Almost-adults - My cool headed sister that didn't drive.  We give Liz a lot of grief for being mean Lizzy and she vociferously denies the charge, saying I was the mean one.  History is on my side, because Scott remembers her being a meany and I hit a car once because she was being mean to Ryan.  But I can see why she thought I was the mean one because she was a passenger in my car more than anyone else and I was a terrible angry driver.  Once she coined the term Beastly Bitter Bad-mood Becka because she forced me (through the rules of obligation) to drive several of her friends home in a snow storm before I had figured out how to lock the hubs on my new truck.  She's been through some traumatic drives with me because we kept riding together during college, but as we got older I really started to appreciate the 20 minutes we had together.  We were going through some stuff and I had someone to talk to who was level headed (despite her propensity for name calling).  Some of my favorite memories were of our conversations while she was thinking about marrying Neil because they were full of so much candor.  This girl is deep.

4.  Adulthood - Liz is a great mother.  Liz's kids are the greatest people in the entire world.  I love my siblings as much and I think Brent's niblings are great, but I love Tyler, Aaliyah and Coby more than I could have imagined I would.  I didn't know I could love kiddies, and it was a little painful at first, like in the animated version of "The Grinch" when his heart grows three sizes, but now it's just the best.  In addition to being a good real mother, Liz is also an excellent 'nother-mother.  She worries about each of us siblings just as much as our mom, has started planning my hypothetical wedding, and worries about my spiritual health because she wants us all to make it back to heaven with her.

5.  Now - Liz, my bestie.  I only get to see Liz about once a month, but I like to think we make the most of it when that happens.  For example, on Thanksgiving I cooked with her, something I'd never done before.  About a year ago we had the single most excellent discussion about faith I've ever had in my entire life and she continues to make sure we talk about matters of the heart occassionally.  In between all of this she's like "when are you going get married?"  Do you know why she does all of this (the dinners, the talking, the blunt questions)?  Because she's my best friend and wants me to be happy.

I hope you all have the chance to meet by sister-bestie.  She's literally The Best.  That's all.