Life Moves Too Fast

In the words of the famous Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast. And if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, when you have kids, you have a physical reminder of just how fast the time goes by. You watch them grow up, and as it's happening, you barely notice it. Then, before you can say ""do you have to make pee-pee on the potty?" your oldest child is off and running, riding her bike around the neighborhood looking for a friend to play with her and talking about the cute boys in her class.

These past couple of months have been a bit outstanding for my oldest. First, she got her ears pierced. A sweet, cute, slightly painful moment of her childhood that came and went. Now we are already past the swab-the-piercings-three-times-a-day stage and we are off to buy new earrings that she can wear.

Then she got her hair chopped off, cutting off ten inches to donate to Locks of Love. This haircut gave her a much more sophisticated look, even though I was sure it was that long hair that was making her look so much older this year.

Next up she completes 1st grade and is now an "incoming" 2nd grader. 2nd grade? Really? It just somehow sounds so much older than 1st grade. Of course it is, but that's beside the point. And the fact that some of her good friends that are one month older than her are starting the 3rd grade is just startling to me. Her birthday missed the cut-off by one day. One single day. And that means she has to stay at home one more year than those friends. When they are off to college and she is still under my wing for her senior year, I will be very thankful for that one single day. I'm not sure she will be though.

Now see what I've gone and done? I've already aged her to high school in a single paragraph. But that's really how it feels around here lately.

We recently decided that she will have her own room as well. We are going to put the younger two together in a room and give her the room she currently shares with her sister. And she'll even have a queen bed too. I think this is making her a little power hungry in the family, but so far she is handling it well. And she really needs her own space these days. My younger daughter and my son are pretty close in their sleep schedules, and also love playing and being with each other, so we figured, why not? We'll see how it all falls into place. Right now we are in the midst of trying to get our son to sleep in a big boy bed, step one of the plan. More on that another time....much more. Suffice it to say, me need sleep.

This week my oldest made fast friends with a 9 year old little girl that moved in next door. And she's always got some friends down the street - one direction or the other - that she wants to go out and play with. This is the first summer that she is stretching her wings a bit, although still within my stated boundaries. And while it's so freeing for me, as well as her, it's a little bittersweet.

Especially when it comes to the fact that she's still just a 7 year old at heart. And I mean that literally. She might think and act like a 10 year old most of the time, and even a 12 year old some of the time, but she's still emotionally just a 7 year old. And I've found that while she loves spending time out playing with her friends, or over at her friend's house all day, she comes home and is even more needy of my time. It quickly becomes physically obvious that she still needs a lot of my support and love and attention. She'll throw herself at me, wrapping her arms around my waist, squealing "mommy!!". And she's right there when her little sister tries to get in on the action, jockeying for my lap or my attention.

This was never more evident than this week when she went to a Little Gym camp day. Long story short, but you can drop in to their camps and do just one day, or a couple, or the whole week. So I had a certificate and figured I'd use it for one morning this week while she wasn't doing anything else. She had just spent the entire day before with her friends from school at a play date, so I hadn't seen her much in the past 24 hours. I dropped her at the gym and she's perfectly fine, interested to see how it's going to go. And even though she hasn't done a Little Gym class in a while, she's been there a ton while her sister does her class, so she's very familiar with the teachers and the space.

But an hour into it I get a call. "She's homesick and wants to go home." They put her on the phone and she's crying saying she wants to leave.

I'm so shocked by it all that I don't know what to make of it. I ask her if someone hurt her or said something to her. Because I'm sure that this child can't just simply be homesick. But indeed, that's all it is. You'd think after that last stint of camp earlier this summer, and the occasional tears that went along with it (although those were before she actually got there and started having fun with the other kids), I would have been more prepared for this. But she came out of that experience so well I'd just about forgotten it. And besides, this was just one single morning, and she understood the whole thing. But she said all the kids were "strangers" and she just wasn't having any fun and she missed me.

While her brain may have been telling her "sure - this will be fun", her heart was telling her that she just wasn't as happy at a camp full of "strangers" when she could have been in the nurturing company of her mother.

I know that she will continue to want to stretch her wings and fly far for the rest of this summer. And she'll fool me into thinking that she's capable of handling it all and she's ready for the freedom.

But she'll always be my little girl at heart. Both in her heart, and in mine.