Dec 10-12, 2008; My Sister

Somewhere during my pregnancy, I had the brilliant idea to ask my sister to come & stay with me for a month around the birth of Annelies. A little background: My parents divorced when I was 14, and both of them remarried. My Mom married an American & we (older Brother, Mom and I) moved to the US. Dad found his wife, Kathleen, closer to where I grew up and they had 2 kids, 19 and 17. The 17 year old is my sister, Liselot, who graduated from high school last summer, and now has a year in between before going on to College. She has visited us in the past, and I thought she might enjoy coming out here for another month. I figured it would be good for Marco to have some extra attention around this time, since he is not big on change. It is also good for his Dutch (the kids are being raised bi-lingual).
Liselot was with us from Nov 12- Dec 12. She and Marco got along like a house on fire (may not be the best expression to use for a fire fighter's wife, but oh well). Liselot pretty much gets along with kids anyway, they really like her. She is a pretty popular baby sitter back at home from what I hear.
Little did we know how emotional and interesting and good this stay would be. For a 17 year old, she shows a lot of maturity. Initially, when the Ds diagnosis came, and I was rushing back & forth to the NICU, meeting with doctors and nurses and social workers and pumping, and basically trying to keep things together, I did not really share many of my feelings with her. I think I felt the need to not burden her. I felt bad enough about the whole situation [this was one of my problems- I felt the need to apologize to everyone for putting a (what might be conveived as) less-than-perfect child into the world.] But then I started thinking about how she must feel. Here she was, in a country far away from her home, with me not there a whole lot, and not sharing any information. This lasted only one day or 2, I decided to just go ahead and level with her, talk to her like I would to a good girlfriend. We went to lunch and had a good talk. It was good. We laughed and cried, and both felt good. She was such an awesome support for me throughout the time she was here, it was so nice. We also had good times, we invited friends over a couple of times and she fit right in. Funny, I sometimes forgot she is not even half my age. How cool to have a sister!