Welcome Home, Little Brother!

After missing three ceremonies in a row, two deployment and one return, I finally got to shed my worst sister in the world title. After being deployed for a year in Kuwait, again, my little brother finally came home mid-February. And this time I planned no trips for the months surrounding the supposed return date because I’ve learned the hard way that if you’ve scheduled a trip around a ceremony date, it’s practically guaranteed that the Army will change the ceremony date to when you’re scheduled to be on a plane.

This time I was around and able to make it to Ft. Lewis, despite being given only 48 hours notice. Since I live 2.5 hours from Ft. Lewis, this shouldn’t have been an issue at all, except I had decided to make an elaborate welcome home sign to help make up for the fact that I’d never been to a ceremony before. I knew exactly what I wanted the sign to look like and spared no expense. It took going to 3 craft stores before I had all the right materials. Since I couldn’t find a machine that cut out letters, I did it the old fashioned way: printing a stencil template, cutting the stencils out, tracing letters onto the camo paper, cutting out the final letters and retracing and cutting letters L, G, P and R when I learned the hard way that those have to be traced backwards. By the end I was cursing the absurdly long last name we share as my scissor fingers felt permanently dented from overuse. It was a serious process and took over two hours to cut everything out. It was totally worth it though when we got to the ceremony and I had the best looking sign there. My sign kicked all those kids’ “welcome home daddy” signs’ butts. Although to be fair, those were the ones that make a person choke up – not so much the case with my scrapbooked sign. The one thing I was missing was lights. Next time . . . Everyone in the family, and some ceremony attendees, were quite impressed with my sign. I suspect my brother was more impressed and pleased with the two six packs of his favorite beer that came with the sign.

You get used to someone being gone and don’t necessarily recognize all the little things you miss until they’re back. We were able to text and email while he was gone, but with a 10 hour time difference, it wasn’t always easy or timely. Now that he’s back, we’ve been playing “words with friends” and arguing constantly over who stole who’s letters and who is the smarter sibling (me, obviously). I missed going running with him and being able to pick up the phone and call him when something reminded me of him or an inside joke we shared. Perhaps most of all, I missed him bickering with me. We bicker out of love, but nobody can do a verbal sparring match like a Goertzen. I also missed using him for his big screen TV and cable, him yelling at me while trying to play video games because I’m terrible at them and his movie collection, which I used as my own movie library. I even missed being able to see his “you’re an idiot” look when I say something he deems as stupid (I can sense from a distance when I’m getting this look, but it’s just not the same as having it directed to your face).

So welcome home, Bert. I’m so very glad you’re back.