Older Brother Surprises Sister on Her 16th Birthday

Photo credit: The Howe family and friends celebrate Isabella Howe’s 16th birthday, submitted photo.

A memorable gift for someone on his or her 16th birthday might be a new car. But even though Isabella Howe was given cash to go towards her first car, that was not the most memorable gift she received for her sweet sixteen.

“My day was so perfect, it was so awesome, but the only thing that would make it any better is if my brother was there,” Isabella Howe said of her birthday. “This was my first birthday without him.”

And then, her brother Alex Howe came to the party.

Getting to the party, though, was an adventure in and of itself.

Alex Howe is a student at Belmont University in Nashville.

“Originally I wasn’t planning on coming home for spring break but then I realized coming home would be a good way of giving her a birthday present of surprising her,” Alex Howe said.

But the first day, instead of getting to Indiana where he was going to catch a Greyhound the rest of the way, he was stuck in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

“We actually stopped there and stayed at a hotel; we ended up having 20 to 24 inches of snow in the span of 6 hours,” Alex Howe said of the road trip he took with a friend. “We were there for 28 hours.”

Kevin Howe, of Geneva Isabella Howe and Alex Howe’s father, said that the logistics of making the surprise work was a challenge, but he and the children’s mom, Kelly Young, of Batavia, made it work.

“I work downtown so it was kind of tricky organizing,” Kevin Howe said.

The family and friends were gathering at a restaurant to celebrate Isabella’s birthday.

“When I got there I told her that Alex called me and said he wanted to talk to her,” Kevin Howe said.

“It’s actually weird for us to have a phone conversation,” Isabella Howe said of her brother.

She said the two usually text. But in this case, her brother was walking through the restaurant while on the phone with his sister. When he arrived at the table, Isabella Howe wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

“I was confused at first, it felt like I was in a dream,” she said.

That moment is not captured in a photo because Kevin Howe was videotaping the event.

Kevin Howe said he and his sister Isabella Howe are close.

“We’re close in age and we grew up together,” he said. “With divorced parents, I know she looks up to me a lot.”