Mommy? You wear jeans a lot, don’t you?
I do, honey bunches of redheadedness, Why?
Well. Perhaps you should consider wearing more skirts and different pants, you know, so you look nicer.
She’s five, y’all. What will she say when she’s fifteen?
Her footfalls were soft down the stairs this morning, muffled by her sleeper jammy feet. She peeked into the den where I sat under a warm blanket in the quietness of our dark house.
“Mommy?” she whispered, curling up next to me and looking deep into my eyes, “Did you see the snow?” I nodded, gazing at her barely contained excitement. “I did.”
Her eyes sparkled (don’t they always?), “Iiiiiii LOVE it!” she threw her arms up, jumped off the couch and proceeded to twirl through the room.
When she was born, our doctor yelled (literally) triumphantly, “It’s a girl!” The nurses cheered, I cried, and Brian just grinned, looking a bit shell-shocked. (He was convinced we were having another boy, and because there are just so few surprises left in life, we had decided to not find out what we were having with my pregnancies.)
After they had weighed her and cleaned her and pronounced her a 9.9 on the Apgar test, they swaddled her and placed her in my arms. The setting sun streamed through the windows as I held her marveling at each one of her features, so tiny and new and breathtaking. She settled and slept.
She arrives at our bedroom door with her dolly in arms, cooing, cuddling, kissing and beaming. She waltzes out of bed. I am convinced of this. She must, because as we go about our morning routines, she cannot stop the motion of her feet or the humming from her heart as she cheers us as we work and prepare for the day.
Oh, how she delights!
“A thousand words could not explain, a thousand worlds could not contain every perfect gift comes from You.”
(~Chris Tomlin)
Every time I think about it, I choke up.
This passage of time. The fleeting of days.
She is five.
Five?
Soon she will be skipping off with her daddy to be dropped at the school door’s edge, and my days will have considerably less sparkle.
I will be honest.
This is the hardest one to bear.
She was 16 months to the day when my cancer diagnosis came.