This is going to be a little bit of stream of consciousness, so please bear with me.

I am getting to the age where I can look back on life, my life, and take lessons from them. One of the lessons is something that was always told to me, but now I feel like I see it take fruit, and that is that there are always good things coming.

Actually, I don’t know if that was a lesson, but I think that would be a lesson that I would impart, in my golden years. Not that I’m in my Golden Years, yet. 🙂

When Wee One was born, a friend of mine from high school was talking about parenting, and she said “There is always something to look forward to, about every age.“ And I’ve always thought about that as Wee One has grown up.

I loved her being two. I loved her being three. I loved her being five, I loved seven, and now I am loving it. We are almost done with summer vacation, and tonight before bed, we were giggling about gross almost 3rd grade jokes:

Guess what?

Mark chicken butt.

Guess who?

Chicken poo.

Silly things, and we were casually snuggling the whole time.

Remember those stupid memes that would dramatically say, you only get 18 summers with your children, so do everything. Well, it’s the end of my eighth summer with my child. And it’s been full and fun and I kind of wish I had planned a little bit more, so then maybe it would have felt more rich. But it was still really busy and really awesome.

I have since seen other memes that answer back to that first point about 18 summers: that you have 18 summers to build a wonderful relationship with a little person. That something else awesome will happen, which reminded me of what my friend told me when Wee One was a baby. Because she was right. I have loved every age. There has always been something awesome that’s going on.

So I thought back to other times in my life, like marching band or couchsurfing or backpacking in Oxford. At the time, I can remember feeling almost panicked, like nothing good is going to happen again, and this is the last moment of good stuff that I’m going to have. But I finally have enough time behind me to realize that’s not true. So even if she grows and all this changes, there’s gonna be something else awesome to look forward to or rather, there’s going to be something else. Awesome to enjoy.

Those are my thoughts this humid mid August night.

Edit to add: I’m still sad she’s going into 3rd grade. Her elementary school years tip over this year.

Continue reading “The next awesome thing” →