A Portrait of the Author's Family As They Are Currently

I am a nineteen-year-old-female, from the general Central East Coast area. I was born in a town called Silver Spring, Maryland and my family lived in Maryland until I was about five, upon which we moved to Bucks County, PA for three years, and then when I was about eight we moved to the town of Red Lion, where we have lived for nearly eleven years.

My parents are musicians, which explains why I know the jam and bread line from The Sound of Music. My mother is a pianist, and she accompanied musicals in high school and she played for vocalists during their lessons. So she knows musicals. My father is a violinist, and he has played in the pit for quite a few musicals, including Les Miserables when MY high school did it. So he also knows musicals. My dad is also a mathematician, and he does that for a living. He solves codes for the government and it's super top-secret and if he told us what he did he would have to kill us!!!!!!! Just kidding. But his work is classified, and therefore it has an aura of mysterious coolness about it, even though it's mostly calculus and boring stuff like that. He works for the Department of Defense/National Security Agency. It's pretty legit.

Anyway, my parents met, and their story, which is completely adorabibble, will probably be the subject of another post, because I like telling that story. But they met and eventually got married and have had five lovely, angelic, beautiful, well-behaved, mature, perfect children.

In case you couldn't tell that was sarcasm... we are not really any of those things. Except maybe one or two of them. And only sometimes.

My brother, the Beast is the oldest. That is obviously not his name, although it would be really cool if it were. He's a year and five months older than me and he's a very chill dude. I was going to give you his initial, which is J, but I have a sister named J and another brother named J so it would be very confusing to have all of those J's in the post at the same time, so my siblings get awesome code names, sort of (but not really) in accordance with their personalities. But I digress.

Upon first seeing the Beast, people tend to be intimidated, but they quickly learn that underneath the scary, poker-faced, metal-band-bodyguard look is a very nice, if somewhat blunt, comedian. The Beast is one of the funniest people I know; he can rattle off whole scenes of the Shrek movies or Pirates of the Caribbean or The Dark Knight without a single qualm. He has a knack for voices and for funny noises; despite the fact that he insists that he does not sing, his is a vocal gift, though not int the traditional sense of the word. Mom is always like, "Go send your resume to Dreamworks or Warner Brothers or Pixar or something! Seriously, they could use you!" And I totally agree. He's gonna be all embarrassed at me, especially if he reads this, which he probably won't.

He hates the attention- he got his Eagle Scout some few-odd years ago and he was like, "Why do we even need a Court of Honor? I don't want all this attention."  Despite these probably embarrassing things I am telling you about him, he still won't admit to any of them, because he hates to perform.

He is also as tough as he looks, which is very tough. I mean, the guy slices his leg open at work with a hedge trimmer, goes to the ER and gets fifteen stitches, and isn't terribly bothered by it at all. Sits there like a brick, while they work on him, according to my mother. The Beast is a lot like the character for whom I code-named him- large, louder than life, intelligent, and just a little bit hairy.



Yeah. That's him. P.S.- This was his favorite movie when he was three, so I feel that it is especially appropriate. And now I had better order my tombstone and plot because he will kill me when he finds out I have stated this on the Internets.

Next comes me, and since this is my blog, I feel no need to describe myself in any great detail- my name is Sarah, and I like to read a lot and write a lot and listen to music and watch British television and eat food and blog. I could well fit into the general descriptions of "short" and "plump" and I wear contacts or glasses. That's me.

The next person in my family is the Beauty, my only sister. I kind of like her a lot, except when I want to go to bed and she wants to stay up late. Then I don't like her at all. But I forgive her for this because the Beauty is such a wonderful person. I tell her just about everything. We get on the Internet and giggle at funny things. She has the most adorabibble laugh.

I named her the Beauty, also stolen from Beauty and the Beast, because she really is beautiful. It's like, unfair how pretty she is. I was born a relatively cute child, but she was born with HUGE DARK EYES that just brimmed over with laughter all the time. She grew up and she stole all of the looks. I remain colorless, and she is vibrant, splashing with color and fire and passion- for that is the Beauty's take on everything. She is a love-or-hate person, with very few things reaching a middle ground. She has super-long hair, so long she can sit on it a little, and it's her pride and joy to have long hair. She's seventeen (I was going to write fifteen, but then I realized, mercy me, that I am old) and she is a hot babe.

This is an example: We go to a day-by-day EFY session in Logan, Utah, when she is fourteen and I am sixteen. I am in a group with "older" youth and she is in a group with "younger" youth. I find her at the dance and we chill. A guy in my company asks her to dance and asks how old she is. She says fourteen and he says, "Wow, I thought you were eighteen." This makes my sixteen-year-old self proud and jealous, which is often an accurate description of the way I feel about the Beauty.

She is also smart and a really, really good singer. Like me, she writes, but unlike me, she is better at being consistent with her writing, with getting the awful first draft out of the way, before she starts to edit. I lose interest in an idea mid-paragraph and don't pick it up again for two years, and as a result I have like several hundred different half-baked ideas lying around in my room or on my computer or in my Martin's potato chip box, which is where I keep old story ideas on paper. She has two or three thoroughly developed ideas within thoroughly developed worlds. I'm not sure which is better. I love her to bits and she thinks I'm annoying, because she got used to having her own room for eight months and now I'm back to spoil it. But I think she loves me, too. Sort of.



Even though Belle has brown eyes, not green, she still bears the most resemblance to the Beauty (my sister, the Beauty, not Belle, the beauty- oh, never mind, you know what I'm talking about)

The next child in our family is the Angel. The Angel is a boy of twelve. I call him the Angel because he is completely innocent and sweet and harmless and Christlike. Unusual qualities for a twelve-year-old boy, you might say; but then, the Angel is already unusual because he is moderately autistic.

The Angel was born on New Year's Day of 2000, which made him the Y2K baby or whatever. He was a normal enough baby until he was about two, during which time my mom was freaking out a little because he didn't say much. He did however have a fondness for music, especially the MOTAB Christmas CD we would listen to during the holidays. He loved that CD and he was so excited to listen to it every year- still is, in fact.

He was diagnosed with autism at the age of three and he started therapy. During his third and fourth years of life, he watched the movie/musical "The Music Man" twice a day and as such I know a great deal of this movie/musical by heart. He could recite the entire movie, and he would often choose inopportune moments to do so, such as the middle of Sacrament Meeting. At full volume. He grew out of the Music Man phase and moved to various other phases, such as Barney and Elmo's World (not the rest of Sesame Street, mind. Just Elmo's World) and Thomas the Tank Engine (that one is ongoing) and Little Einsteins and so on.

He has had a phase where he was obsessed with the shape of a sign on a stick, or a lollipop, because it was something being held up by a stick. He used to steal my parents' credit cards and walk around with those and pencils like they were signs. That moved to an obsession with road signs. Then my dad played a game with him, where he would say what was on the road sign backwards. "Pots," "Deeps Timil," and "Etatsretni" are all part of my vocabulary now.

But he loves movies and shows, and he especially loves the credits- he will watch the whole movie, beginning to end, and get really annoyed at you if you skip the credits, because he likes to write them down. Yes. you heard correctly.

But most of all he is gifted in music. This stemmed from the MOTAB Christmas CD, which I already mentioned. He loved it, and eventually when my mother started to teach him how to play the piano, he began to show an interest in music- and then we realized that he had perfect pitch and he could tell you the key of a song by listening to it. I mean, I have pretty good relative pitch. If you play the note, it's likely I'll know what it is. But he can do it out of the blue. We put in the MOTAB CD this past December and there was this one song where they kept changing keys and it was like a field day for him. He loved it.

That's the other reason I call him the Angel. Someday, in the great beyond, he'll be among the heavenly choirs. Who knows- he might even sing a solo. He sang one in Stake Conference. I was devoutly proud of him, even though I was in Utah at the time. I am always proud of the Angel.



He would probably be that awkwardly blond one in the back- it's the closest to his hair color.

And finally, there is the Prodigy. He is nine years old and he is as smart as a whip. His reading level is college equivalent, according to the tests. He's in seminar, a special program where they talk about stuff with all the other smart kids. He learned to read at the same time as the Angel, although admittedly he was three and the Angel was six. That was also around the same time they were both potty-trained. The Prodigy is a fun brother to have, because while he is not as tall or as grown up or as naturally musically inclined as the Angel, he is not autistic, and he is smart enough that he's mostly not annoying. Mostly. Sometimes he is, but that's life, and I'm willing to be patient, as I don't see him eight months of twelve. He's a great kid.

He has a fondness for me which I do understand; being nine years old and a slender nine years old at that, he is often used as the throw pillow of the Beast and the verbal grindstone of both the Beast and the Beauty, and even very occasionally the Angel, who is innocent and childlike but has picked up the ability to tease the Prodigy. It's not hard to do- the Prodigy is a sensitive little bloke- but he often feels like everyone picks on him and nobody is nice to him but Sarah. Most of the time this is, sadly, true. I'm guilty of being mean to him, too, but I have tried to apologize for it, because me being mean to him feels wrong- like I'm betraying a sacred trust.

The Prodigy has a penchant for stating the obvious, but then, what nine-year-old doesn't? He loves video games, as do the Beast and the Angel and frankly also the Beauty and myself. He loves to read- he's working his way through the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons. He loves Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which are excellent books, and he hates being bored with a passion, like me. In that respect we are very similar despite our ten-year difference.



I promise you, the Prodigy is not as frightening as this baby. This baby is cute, but it is frightening. The Prodigy is just cute.

That is my family. Dad, Mom, the Beast, me, the Beauty, the Angel, the Prodigy. I love them all to bits, and they love me back because I'm lovable and perfect and everything- but mostly because people love their families. And before anyone protests that statement, I define family as the people who love you and whom you love, regardless of blood relation. I'm just lucky that my family happens to be my biological family as well as my spiritual family.