Happy Birthday to TJ

Luckily, enough good things happen in this world that all the horrible stuff doesn’t have a chance of dominating everything. On February 27th 2004, little Tanner Joseph, more commonly known as TJ or Teej, was born. My little brother. He got out to a real shaky start, being born three months premature. There were days when we weren’t sure he’d make it. I remember going to the neonatal intensive care unit at Saint Mary’s hospital and visiting him with my step-mom, my dad and my sister. We’d have to scrub our arms up to our elbows with soap before we were allowed to enter to help eliminate the chance of germs affecting the fragile little bundles within.
Once inside, for the first few weeks, I could only look at TJ through the clear plastic walls of his incubator. My dad and step-mom were allowed to carefully hold his two-pound self once in a while, but the rest of us would have to wait until he was more stable. Honestly, I was afraid I would somehow hurt him if I were to touch him, so I was relieved by the rule.
Back then, he looked more like a little alien than a baby, especially when he wore his eye-protecting glasses and the flashing bracelets that monitored various bodily things. Tubes and wires were running in and out of everywhere. The one normal baby-like thing in there with him was a tiny blue hat, which fit loosely over his head and always seemed a bit crooked. I’m glad they put that hat on him, just to remind him that he was indeed a baby. A baby who would grow and get strong and would one day get to wear such hats while bouncing and giggling on his father’s knee, as all babies do. Not to be in a plastic box, wired to a machine for eternity.
TJ had to stay in that hospital room, in an incubator, for three months, up until the day he was supposed to be born. Even after that, he had hurtles to jump that other kids get to obliviously stride through. His digestive system took time to fully develop and for a while he was fed through a tube. He slowly graduated to eating real food, but not much of it. It took a long time for TJ to learn how to like food and he has always been underweight. Currently, however, he and his voracious appetite are doing their best to make up for lost eating time. His lungs were behind as well and he still suffers from asthma-like attacks today, but they’re getting less common.
The list of complications he faced, and may face for the rest of his life, goes on, but for the most part he is a very healthy, very happy kid. And he’s smart. And witty. And all the wonderful things a little kid can be. He might always be a hair shorter than the rest of the class, but he can tell fart jokes in a manner that makes his 30 year old sister, who hates fart jokes, laugh. Laugh hard.
Whenever I think about TJ’s first three months of life, and how uncertain things were and how strange he looked and how scared I was to touch him, I go numb. Of course, there’s no real way to describe it. He used to pester me non-stop to push him in his swing and I 99.9% of the time caved; he’ll talk to me for an hour on skype, though half of which is just him making faces at himself or making fart sounds; I once traced his hands with a pen and paper at least 50 times over because he liked it so much; he likes to race me around the house on his bicycle, even if it’s raining out; he helped me bake cookies this summer even though there was the opportunity for playing games on the Wii. Whenever I’m there, he’s around. Wanting to play or looking for help or needing to show me something. Making me feel like a big sister who’s loved and who loves. I can’t wait to be there in person for his birthday, some day down the line.

The second semester starts tomorrow. Wish me luck!