Friday, May 9, 2008
Good bye diapers
My girls are growing up! Sabrina is fast out of diapers and I have only a handful of poopy underpants (so far) to show for it. She is sleeping in a big girl bed, and suddenly I realize that the baby days are gone. I am selling some clothes at a garage sale next week and my baby days are gone. I have a semi-permanent part-time position at Penn State and my baby days are gone. Lauren will be in Kindergarten and Sabrina will go to school 5 mornings a week and my baby days are gone...and I can’t get them back.
Wait? Which parts do I want to retrieve? The last 10 pounds to lose that hang on for at least a year? The crying through the night? The middle of the nights cries for help when they can’t find the paci? (Wait, I still have those..) The trips to the Dr to hear “Yup, that ear looks terrible. Here is your antibiotic”...(wait, I still have those too).
No, it is the realization that my kids are growing up and my job, though not nearly over, has changed. I will become less 24/7 caretaker and more Making Good Choices Coach. The amount of hours we spend together will decrease but the intensity of each moment will increase. Now Lauren says “you hurt my feelings” as she stomps upstairs when I tell her she has made a poor choice. Now I leave Lauren before the door to her classroom because she is a big girl now. Now I have time to be with friends and be by myself and nobody cries too hard when I leave for an hour or 2. And that is good.
But I also know that the day will come when I will join the line-up at cars I saw at Penn State today. The parents coming to retrieve their college students from the dorms because the semester is over. And worse I will be a parent who lines up to drop off my girls to the dorm for their first semester away from me and my home. But I won’t hold them back. I will follow in my mother’s footsteps and drop them off and run back to the car so I can cry like a baby :) (yes, Mom, I did see you in that car...)
But I get ahead of myself. We still have the 1st day of Kindergarten, more recitals and games, tears over broken friendships and broken hearts, fights over clothing choices and curfews. We have years left of reading together and traveling together and having dinner together and sharing our lives together. And I realize that I will look back so fondly at this time so I will decide to celebrate each moment more...today. After my nap.
