Abby is growing up, and I love it and hate it all at the same time.
Our girl finished 2nd grade on Tuesday and I know to a lot of people that doesn’t seem very old, but when it’s happening to your oldest child, it’s surreal. I don’t remember when the shift happened- when she stopped being a little girl who still needed me to lay with her at night and turned into the girl who shuts her door and would rather have our dog lay with her then her mom. It bothers me that I can’t remember the last time she asked me to lay with her, or if I let my mind wander back further, the last time I carried her up the stairs to bed. And now, parenting has become so different. Some days she talks like a teenager, giving me an eye roll with her hands on her hip and I get a quick vision of life with a teenaged girl. She can scream and yell and throw amazing fits with the impatience of a toddler, and the fury of a teenager. Other days, she will show glimpses of her younger self, cuddling on the couch and asking if we can talk instead of read before bed. Tock and I call her our little experiment because she’s our first and because we really have no idea what we’re doing (which is funny because everyone asks us for parenting advice and it always make me laugh because you should see the sh*t that goes on at our house!).
So here’s our girl, on her first day of summer vacation, already looking older to me.
