April 12, 2015
Last Friday I found myself with a no school day for my girls. Days from school are kind of a treat for me now. I have my daughters during the weekdays and since they’ve both started the same school schedule it’s been a very routine life for us. When they were little and not in school yet I would fill our days with classes and trips. I had a membership everywhere, music classes for both from the time they were babies. Gymnastics and classes at the zoo. Mom and baby swim class, night nature hikes. But time goes faster than you’d like, and now they are both putting in eight-hour days at school, so from the time I pick them up after school we are following a routine, a schedule that facilitates an easy morning the next day. And so on and so on.
I haven’t taken the girls to the Denver Nature and Science Museum in a long time. When I used to take them I usually had a stroller. And snacks galore. And diapers and wipes and booger rags and emergency clothes. It would be a whole day adventure.
As we trudged across the parking lot to enter the museum, I marveled at how little stuff I had on me. A well stocked purse. A camera. That was it. We were there to see a temporary exhibit on mythical creatures. Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, all that jazz. We walked through the museum and I watched the girls running ahead of me, both reading the placards on their own (mostly). I watched them move together through crowds of bigger kids. And I marveled at how they are big girls now. Schoolgirls. I can remember being their ages. Which means they will remember these trips, and not really the ones where they were sitting in a stroller.
And that gave me a feeling of, reassurance I suppose. That the good days are just starting. They sleep through the night. They wipe their own butts. They blow their own noses and walk on their own legs. And now I am free to move with them instead of for them.
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