this corner of earth...smiles for me.: August 2011

It's my youngest child's LAST first day of school! Christy is a senior in high school! As a mom, I spent so much of my life focusing on my children's "firsts": first steps, first words, first time riding the bicycle without training wheels, first trip to the orthodontist...

And my husband and I have documented those many firsts over the last 26 years with our four children. Maybe we were a bit over-the-top, I don't know. But I don't regret the 40 plus photo albums stacked on my basement shelves or the hours and hours of video footage (painstakingly switched over to disks in the past few years. Hey, what good is a videotape if you no longer have the machine with which to view it?!)

Just so I could say I finished well (!!), on the day school started, I drove behind my daughter's car all the way to school, walked up and down her hallway, smiled at her teachers and the milling students, got back in my car and came home. This has been a tradition of ours, to go with each one of our kids for every first-day-of-school. (They loved it in the early years, nearly died of embarrassment in the middle years, tolerated it in the latter years and then appreciated it in the end!)

I did it one more time because the "firsts" are winding down for us. In our family, there will never be another first day of school.

When I was knee-deep in diapers, snotty noses, sibling rivalry, 4-kids-in-school schedules, sometimes well-meaning old ladies would come up to me (usually in the grocery store or at church)and say, "Enjoy this time, because it will be gone before you know it!" Yeah, right...

And now, I guess I'm one of those old ladies.

How did THAT happen?

But I love this stage of life. My children are grown up (almost). I only feel little tinges of bittersweet, not regret or loss in this season. Right now I see my mommy years more through the lens of a rear-view mirror. In fact, most of the time I watch younger mothers who are juggling multiple children and I just can't, for the life of me, imagine how they actually DO it all!!

My heart swells with pride when I watch my eldest daughter nurture her little one, when I see my strapping son working hard selling hotdogs at the Phillies stadium to make money for college, when I sit in a Sunday morning service as my daughter leads us in worship, when I observe my 17-year-old teenager choosing to make good decisions, even when those decisions are not easy ones.

So when I look back, recognizing that life is also made up of "lasts", it's really mostly nostalgia and sweet remembering. (And you all know how it is: every mom, as she looks back and reminisces over the years, remembers less and less of the bad and more and more of the good. By the time my youngest is 25, I'll probably think they were all angels and never gave me a single moment's pause!)

I pulled up all of Christy's first-day-of-school pictures and posted them below. I love this girl!