Birthday

I was happy to let bedtime linger tonight, not wanting to let my daughter go to sleep.  It is her last night as a 2 year-old, and I want to savor it.  When she was born, I couldn't imagine ever getting out of the NICU, let alone envision the person she would become.  I remember looking at her tiny swaddled body in what seemed to be an enormous crib on her first day home from the hospital and thinking - now what?  Her first birthday was an emotional milestone for us, not only for the passage of time but that we had made it to that moment.  Raising children is a real experiment in time and space.  There are moments, usually between 5 and 7 o'clock, when time seems to stand still.  Then there are moments, like tonight, when I look back over my three years as a mother and cannot understand how it has rushed by so quickly.  A year or so ago I was walking with Jane and an elderly woman smiled at me and said, "This is the best time of your life and you don't even know it.".  The problem is that I do know it, and that is why it is so hard to have it speed along so fast.  Watching my baby girl sleep her way to being a 3 year-old is bittersweet.  I am proud of the fact that she is healthy, strong and most of all, happy, but am sad to see the baby in her disappear.