It’s my seventeenth birthday and I’m told that in nine months I’ll have a half sibling. What do I say? How do I react? I remember my mind was sort of blank. At the age of seventeen I was pretty set in my ways and officially used to being an only child. I wasn’t looking forward to the baby that would be moving right across the hall from me. Nolan Noble Calloway was born August 24th, 2011 - the same day as my grandfather Jesse Calloway.
Once my half brother was born, I loved him instantly. I didn’t care that I was no longer an only child. Nurses added to the awkward age gap remarking they “had babies whose siblings were seventeen months apart”.
Shortly after my brother moved in, those two feet from my bedroom door, we discovered he had colic. Baby colic (also known as infantile colic) is defined as “episodes of crying for more than three hours a day for more than three days a week for three weeks in an otherwise healthy child between the ages of two weeks and four months”.
As you can imagine at the age of seventeen, I wasn’t thrilled that constant crying was interrupting my nights of sleep. After long nights of baby-sitting, I would sometimes end up crying with him. Now, almost three years later he keeps me laughing.
In this book I explore and document how a two-year-old’s things can take over your life, your home, and possibly even a seventeen year-old’s bedroom.