Happy, Happy Birthday

Today is my brother Ian's twenty-eighth birthday and to honor this day I've decided to post a whole bunch of old pictures of him. And since most of these pictures come from my personal collection I'm in almost all of them too.

I think this might be the day of his baby blessing, although that's just a guess. It's the youngest picture I have of him.
This is my favorite old picture of us. We're only fourteen months apart in age and I think this was the last time I was the taller of the two. At least this much taller. He's taller now, and has been for many years.

Ian is very funny. He's a great story-teller and a wonderful actor. This is a picture from A Midsummer Night's Dream that we did in high school. We were two of the five mechanicals. I was Quince (that director only cast me in male roles, I don't know why) and Ian had the difficult but oh-so-humorous task of playing The Wall between Pyramus and Thisbe. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read the play. Or watch it somewhere. Anyway, this is my favorite "action shot" of us because we're the only ones still in character. Yes, we were in the background, but we were still supposed to be involved in what was happening on-stage.

I had the opportunity to see Ian into the MTC. He served in the Georgia Atlanta Mission and spoke Spanish. Funny story: the night before he went into the MTC he slept on the couch in Bryan's kitchen. Bryan and I were friends at the time, but the reason Ian stayed there was because Bryan's roommate Scott was my good friend from the year before (and maybe my home teacher? my memory is fuzzy on that detail). I got married while Ian was on his mission. I felt bad that he missed it, but was glad that he had at least met Bryan, even if it wasn't intentional.


Okay, so Ian kind of has crazy eyes in this picture, but I think it's really cute of my sister-in-law Amanda. Also, all of my photo archives (with the exception of the stuff Bryan scanned in for me last night) are temporarily unavailable, so I had to grab a picture of them from their blog. I really love Amanda, I think she's swell. So this picture is to say, "Good job Ian."

And this is my new favorite picture of Ian. I hope that he and Amanda don't mind that I snagged this from their blog too. Ian is a wonderful father. Clara is a lucky little girl. Although, looking at this picture, I think Ian would say he's the lucky one.

Happy birthday Ian. I hope your day is just what you want it to be.