I moan and complain a lot about how my kids are growing up too fast, how I want Sammy to just stay a baby (he’s still a baby, right? Even though he’s 1 now??), and how in general time passes too damn quickly. (Except when I was bitching about wanting my pregnancy to be over. The grass is always greener, no?)
But one comment I got on this post (“Does anyone know how to freeze time?”) has really stuck with me, and though I didn’t really get it at the time, I am starting to see it now.
Karen at Pediascribe told me this:
In some respects freezing time would be great. I miss my kids as babies. But in other respects, I’m glad time marches on and they grow older and wiser and morph into little people. We’re just back from vacation and we had the best time with our 11 and 13 yr old kids. It was a totally different trip than when we went when they were 3 and 5. In a different way. In a totally fun way. In a way that could not have happened had I frozen time.
I am really starting to see this with Kate. We do such fun things together now, stuff that Andy and I enjoy as much as she does, and not just in the “Oh this is so fun because I love seeing her have so much fun” kind of way. Karen’s words came back to me the last time we were at Chuck E. Cheese. Kate and I played a fierce game of air hockey (one of my personal faves), and even though she thought she was scoring when the puck went into the goal on her side, we had a blast. We watch tv shows and movies we both enjoy now (she has inherited my love for “Full House,” which makes me ridiculously happy, and seriously she, Andy and I all really liked the new Hannah Montana movie!), we play fun games like Uno, and we read real books together. Just last night I was trying to figure out how old she has to be before I start buying her Sweet Valley Twins books… I can hardly wait. (If only I hadn’t sold my complete collection at a garage sale…).
And while I still look wistfully at the pictures of her as a tiny baby, wishing I had clearer memories of those sleep-deprived, hormonally-imbalanced days, I am so proud of the individual she is becoming, and I look so forward to all the ages and stages she’ll go through in the future.
Except the part when she’s a teenager and hates me. Then I’ll be looking for a way to fast forward time, rather than freeze it.
