So yesterday, Mrs. KVS tells me that we need to pack up the “baby books” on the kids’ bookshelf to make way for the growing collection of big kids’ books. The more I thought about it, the more it was sad, in a way . . . the youngest one is now in first grade, learning how to read, so she’s beyond the baby stories.
Getting rid of these books is depressing, not only because the kids are growing quickly, but that means that “the factory is closed,” so to speak. Each stage the youngest one goes through is the last time we’ll have to deal with it. This is our last time dealing with first grade.
Tell me about it…
My baby got her driver’s license last Thursday, and she had her Sweet 16 party on Saturday. She can now drive on her own - no more “Moooom, will you take me to the mall?” She has her own social circle that does not include me, except as the figure of authority on the fringe of the party. She’s an inch taller than I. She can cook and handle laundry and household chores, she’ll be getting a job when swim team season is over. And in 3 years, she’ll be in college.
I’m as proud as I can be of her, but I look at the pictures of her as she’s grown and I can’t believe how recently and how long ago it all was.
Oh yeah, she boxed up all her Button Bear books and Dr. Suess and the rest - her children will read them some day…
My oldest turned 15 yesterday. All weekend I couldn’t (maybe I didn’t want to) shake the thought that this young man made me a mother. I’ve enjoyed nothing in my life more and I couldn’t be prouder of him. Still I long for reading while rocking, the kind of checking in that young children do and to here him say “lello” instead of “yellow” and “coffee” instead of “copy”.
I suppose it will be just as bad when my oldest (now in 4th grade) finally decides to put away the Big Bird dolls she’s been sleeping with since she was an infant.
Some childhood things are sacred and my never get put away KVS, for your daughter it may be her Big Bird dolls, for our son it’s the Lego’s. He’ll go all week being grown up and responsible, school work, sports, chores, service projects, teenage get togethers and the like. Then saturday morning we’ll awaken to find this long legged red head with peachy fuzzy chin in front of the cartoons with the lego box for a couple of hours before he starts the yardwork.
Or “the deer and the ants go to play” instead of “the deer and the antelope play.” I force myself to read to the littlest KVS now, even if it’s way past bedtime . . . I just don’t want to give up having her sit in my lap, laughing with me at some silly joke.
Me too. To think that just two short months ago our child was a blob of cells behind my wife’s pelvis. Now it’s got arms and legs and it’s moving up her abdomen.
