#siblings

#siblings

When I tell people I bought a fixer-upper in Vermont with my siblings, the reaction is almost always the same: part envy, part amusement, part horror. "That's so exciting, but you must really like your siblings. I could never do that with mine. It would end in disaster," they say. Did I mention the house - tucked deep in the woods - is nearly impossible to find, three stories tall, and has no interior staircases or electricity?

The golden bag competition for the Walter family dates back to 2006, when siblings - Jesse Walter, Rebecca Rutherford, Jeremy Walter and Sarah Bauer - observed their mother, Diane Walter, reusing a gold-colored gift bag and handing it to her "favorite" child. Since then, the competition has become a year-long campaign that results in a winner being crowned (and heckled!) at the family's annual Christmas gathering.

My sister and I have always been close in the kind of way that only siblings with a two-year age gap can be. We grew up sharing everything from wardrobes to the same old hand-me-down phone. As adults, though, life has pulled us in different directions. She's 33 now, I'm 31, and somehow, we spent most of our twenties living in different countries.

As parents age, siblings may face tough decisions about who will take care of them if they become infirm or frail. And then there's the matter of how the estate will be divided up when parents die. To say that disagreements crop up is perhaps an understatement. This potential for family friction has given birth to various customs. In the past, the eldest son often got it all.That's called primogeniture although it's no longer the way things typically play out today.

Mary Fagan, a 64-year-old woman, was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, later determined to be a homicide after her brother confessed to strangling her.

"Growing up with an adventurous dad, my sister and I had seen most of the US and several other countries by the time we finished college."

Whatever her reasons are, you are not going to find out right now. You have no choice but to wait.

"Most, if not all, have been in the district since kindergarten," Timothy Lamb, the school's assistant principal, told Today. "Some teachers don't even know they're twins, even though some do look alike."

Joint home ownership was an obvious next step for us. We've endured every argument we could have had, overcome many different situations, and weathered family secrets and friend fallouts by each other's side.