Missing them already

It has struck me recently that my time with my little children is so very short.  My little children are slowly becoming my not so little children, and I am already missing them....Not the messy diapers (I still have plenty of that with Lincoln), but the wonderfully perfect days when your children are angels and you couldn't be happier to be a mother, when your toddler says the darnedest things, and the moments when your little one want nothing more than have you "cuddle" them on the couch "just because", those are the moments I already miss.   I can already feel those moments slipping away.  I am a little sad.

 I would love to call all the moments back that I missed because I was too busy answering the phone, changing the laundry, or even talking on the phone.  It won't be long until Alli no longer asks for cuddles, or needs me to read a bedtime story.  Soon enough she will be reading herself to sleep...I am not sure I am ready for that yet.  She wants to learn to ride her bike this summer - a two wheeler, and she thinks its cool that it looks like a teenager bike...(which is the style I thought I wanted, but now I kind of wish it were a princess bike after all...)  Yesterday Alli told me she wanted to be in the Army...I am definitely not ready for that!  When I asked her why, she responded that then she wouldn't have to sit buckled up in a seat belt.  I laughed to myself and asked her how she knew that...to which she replied that she saw it in the pictures...An advertisement somewhere?  Who knows, but I do know that I don't even want to think about my child riding into war in the back of a Humvee, not now and not ever!

But I realize that my child is seeing our world in a new way each and every day.  Her world is expanding to the "real world" slowly but surely.  A world although wonderful and amazing in so many ways, it is also a world I can hardly stand to encounter myself sometimes.  It can be painful and ugly....and I can't protect her from all that is bad in it, now matter how hard I try, even if I wanted too, which I don't.  I understand that facing the bad and choosing the better part is necessary for her, for all of them.  I worry about it though, about teaching her all she will need to know to find happiness in this life and the next.

Their lives are simple now, the way it should be.  As I have watched them grow, I yearn to lead a simpler life myself.  A life where I really did focus on the important things, not just wish I could.  Who knows how to manage it.   I do know though, that tomorrow I am going to ask Alli to "cuddle", just because.