I'm Not Ready

I so clearly remember taking Mattie to get the last set of shots she had. She was over a year old, probably close to 18 months, but still a baby. Amid her tears and my restraining her and both our heartbreak, I remember the nurse saying "now she's done with shots until it's time for her to go to Kindergarten". And I remember thinking how that was so far away that it didn't deserve space on the radar of my mind. My baby was my baby and forever my baby she'd be.

Next week we will go to get those very pre-Kindergarten shots that the nurse spoke of. And in twenty days that baby turns five. And I'm not ready yet. At this moment, five seems decades older than four to me. This fall we will send her off to "real" kindergarten. No more half-day church pre-school, and afternoons home with me. I'm not ready for that either.

And even as I write this, and with each passing birthday that I feel these...feelings, I know that it will be the blink of an eye, and I'll be lamenting her starting high school, and then going to college, and then (gasp) getting married. I think I know, better than I've ever known, but surely not as well as I will come to know, how fast it really all goes. The sting of that fact of life never dulls for me.

All I'm saying is it literally seems like yesterday that she fit in my hands.

And now she's 8' tall (or therabouts) and knows everything.

And I still haven't figured out when that happened.