There are times...

...when I look at my little girl and she takes my breath away.

  

This tends to happen to me at unexpected times...not times when I as a parent am being "set up" by circumstances to suddenly realize the ever-quickening passage of time and quick maturation of my first born.  No, I don't catch myself with a lump in my throat when she has just gotten all gussied up for an English Country Ball, or has just primped and prepared for some other special occasion.  If we sent the girls to public school, I suspect it wouldn't even be so much that first bus ride to junior high.  But instead, these moments creep up and seem so mundane.  Today, while giving Moo her spelling/vocabulary test, she just suddenly looked...so...grown...up.  She came out of her room to the kitchen table, and as I dictated the words to her, I considered her quiet and studious pose in her neatly wound little braids, her signature headscarf, her fingernails painted in a light tone and her growing bunch of bracelets that each means a special "something" to her and...well...*gulp*.  It hit me.  She is not getting anything but older, wiser, more mature and closer to her launch date.   We can try to hold on to these children that we have on loan to us for just a short while...but they will grow up.  They will leave.  They will have their own babies.  Those babies will grow up fast.  Another mom will swallow hard and dictate the next vocabulary word and quietly get the camera to remember this very normal moment where the speed of time's passage became crystal clear.  

This is the natural cycle of things.  And I am in awe.

And that, my friends, is why I have to bring this post to a close and go hug my girls for awhile.