On May 7th, 1993, my eleventh birthday, my mother broke the news. I was going to be a big sister to twins. I was not happy. Being an only child for over eleven years with divorced parents had made me extremely spoiled and I did not want that to change. I had become very accustomed to not having to share my family"s love and the prospect of another child in the family scared me very much. For weeks I didn"t speak to my mother because I felt that she had betrayed me in some peculiar way by becoming pregnant and that she no longer loved me as much. .

             Approximately three months into the pregnancy my mom miscarried one of the babies and was bedridden for the rest of the pregnancy. The doctors said she was lucky to still be carrying one of them, considering that she was thirty-five and sick to begin with. This baby would be special everyone said, but I didn"t feel any better. Why did my mother need another child? Wasn"t I enough? Then one day it all changed. My mother sat me down and told me that she still loved me but she had been trying to become pregnant with her boyfriend for almost six years now and she never thought she"d have another child. Even at eleven I could see how important this was to my mother so I began to become happy too. After all I was going to be sister, and being a sister to a very important baby was even better than that. .

             KateLynn Elizabeth Bright was born on January 20th, 1994 at 12:20am to Joanne Theresa Whittaker-Miller and Eugene Patrick Bright. KateLynn weighed 8lbs, 1oz and was 19.5 inches long, a rather small infant that would have a rather large impact on so many lives. I, Jennifer Lynn Miller, was not even twelve years old when my half-sister came into this world and changed my life from there on out. .

             Even as a newborn Katie was incredibly intelligent and she clung to me immediately. By the time she was five months old my mother had gone back to work and I baby-sat constantly, which only brought my kid sister and me closer.