Reflections

I am waxing nostalgic today...somehow, it suddenly occurred to me that my kids are growing up!

Maybe it was the fact that the first day I picked DG up from school (she's going one morning each week) she was full of chatter about her new friends, the song she learned (which she then proceeded to sing for me - and it was one we'd never sung at home!), how she learned all about "A"...

Maybe it was the fact that Captain told me the other day that he was getting a little bit too big for me to keep calling him "My Baby Boy" as I am wont to do in moments of snuggliness before bedtimes.

Maybe it was the fact that I plopped Littlest One into a freshly disinfected (with steam!) Exersaucer and she knew immediately how to spin herself around to grab the toys...

Maybe it was the fact of seeing an engagement announcement for someone I babysat for 20 years ago. Granted, he was 4 when I started sitting for him and his brother but still, it made me start thinking about what it was going to be like when Captain started talking to girls and bringing them home...sigh...

I think it is mostly because I went to the Homecoming game for the High School that I attended and saw some of my classmates, and those who graduated the year or two ahead or behind me cheering on their own children...and I stopped to think about the fact that I could be sending a child off to High School this year...if I'd married the boy I was dating in High School and followed the Grand Plan we had concocted about when we would marry, how many children we would have, and I realized that I would indeed be sending my oldest to High School as a Freshman, and the youngest would be in first grade.

Then I quickly grabbed my babies up and snuggled with them while we read my favorite stories this morning, and I am ever so grateful that I was dumped by that boy, grateful for the people in my life, if not always the choices I made in the 5 years that followed, for they led me to meet BB, and to know without a second of doubt that he was the one that God had planned for me.

And I look at my 3 little blonde babies, so distinctly blonde, where all my pictures from childhood have 4 or 5 of us with varying shades of dark brown and black hair...their big blue eyes lighting up with delight, discovery, mischief, humor, love...their giggles, their voices as they play, and the way that Littlest One has started those wonderful sloppy, nuzzly kisses when I hold her, leaving that trail of drool across my cheek, my neck, my shoulder...

I marvel at the Blessings I've been granted and wonder how on earth I could possibly have ever been thinking that I knew what was best when I was all of 18...