Happy Birthday Emily!

Today is my cousin Emily's birthday. She is 5 months older than I am and while that doesn't sound like a lot, growing up she was always so much smarter than I was!

Emily and I were fortunate to grow up in close proximity with each other and I have many wonderful memories of my time with her. Unfortunately, I have very few memories of the above Hawaii trip, except that after we were older and saw this photo, we claimed it was the only time our modesty-driven mothers ever let us wear anything sleeveless!

I think one of the reasons we were good friends, and have remained that way, is because our parents are good friends. Our fathers, who are brothers, have worked together since we were babies, and our mothers had incredibly similar child rearing techniques and compared notes often.

At one point during our growing up years, Emily and her sister created a pretend design company, McGill Fashions, and invited my sister and I to participate. We had pretend names, ones that we loved but were not privileged to receive from our parents (Mine was Sadie and Emily's was Stacey, right?). This "company" mostly consisted of taking all of our mother's old catalogues and cutting out the models and clothing to create our own "portfolio." We would then get on the phone with each other and ask, "I have a customer needing a yellow sun dress, do you have anything like that?" We would go through our collection and send the appropriate material to our cousin through our dads at work. As I reflect, the whole idea was ridiculous, but I spent quite a good deal of time in my closet/office working on my creations!

As we entered our dating years, I remember creating a tradition of attending general conference together taking whoever it was we happened to be dating at the time. Our grandfather served in various positions in the church that enabled us to have tickets to conference every six months, which were always accompanied by lunch in his office between sessions provided by grandma. A few memories: Peter, Callahan, Scott Miles son, what's his name?, blanket outside, apple butter, sandwiches, chips and fruit, meeting general authorities we thought to be of celebrity status... these were wonderful times together!

As our family was always close growing up, I have many memories of times in Peak's Circle- Christmas Eve at G&G's with Santa showing up, the annual Easter Egg hunt in the backyard, BBQ's at Marge and George's... we had a happy childhood!

Today, I admire Emily for the sincere and down-to-earth person she has always been, for the dedicated and patient wife and mother she has become as well as for the organized and border-line obsessively clean woman she is, no doubt genetic from her mother. I also love that our parents have become, perhaps unbeknown to them, a wonderful source of entertainment for us. Just yesterday I received a phone call from Emily sharing a mental picture of our mothers, standing in the middle of Nordstrom trying to figure out what each other's cell phone numbers were and how to program them into their phones so they could shop without each other for a while. The picture is very classic Tam and Mel and we love them!

Happy birthday Emily, thanks for introducing me to this crazy blogging world and being a consistent example to me. I love you!