小屁孩日记 · 07 The Third Wheel
I met my older brother, Rodrick, a few days after I was born. Up to that point I thought I was an only child, so I was pretty disappointed to find out I wasn't. My family was living in a really small apartment back then, and I had to share a room with Rodrick. He got the crib, so for the first few months of my life I had to sleep in the top dresser drawer, which I'm pretty sure isn't even legal.
Eventually, Dad moved his work stuff out of the room he was using as an office an made it into a nursery. I got Rodrick's old crib, and he got a new bed. Almost EVERYTHING I had back in those days was a hand-me-down from Rodrick. By the time something came to me, it was either worn-out or covered in slobber. Even my PACIFER was a hand-me-down from Rodrick. I don't think he was ready to give it up, though,
which might explain why he's never really liked me. It was just the four of us for a long time, and then one day Mom told me she was gonna have another baby. I was glad she gave me the heads-up so I could be ready. When my little brother, Manny, came along, everybody thought he was so cute. But what they don't tell you about babies is that after they're born, they have this black stub on their belly button where the umbilical cord was tied off.
Eventually, the stub dries up and falls off, and the baby has a regular-looking belly button. The thing is, nobody ever FOUND Manny's stub. And to this day I'm still paranoid it's gonna show up somewhere. When I was newborn, Mom put me in front of the TV for an hour a day to watch educational videos.
I don't know if those videos actually made me any smarter, but at least I was smart enough to figure out how to put on something I WANTED to watch. I ALSO figured out how to remove the batteries from the remote so no one could turn the educational videos back ON.
But when you're a baby, you can't really get around a lot, so there was only one place I could hide the batteries. I think Mom should've let me crawl around on the floor more when I was little, because I was WAY behind the other kids in my playgroup when it came to the physical stuff. While the others were sitting up and couch surfing, I was still working on lifting my head off the ground.
