SO THANKFUL TO BE HER MOM

BRITTANI IS ENGAGED!

I know what you are all thinking because I'm thinking the exact same thing...there is no possible way I am old enough to have a child getting married!  Well I'm not! And yet, here I am planning a wedding!

I think back to the days of pigtails and bows and counting and the ABCs.  I think about swing sets, parks, flying kites and going on walks.  Her singing and dancing to every Barney song.  Her first day of preschool, her first day of junior high, her first day of high school, her first day of college.  I remember her first swim meet when she was four years old and wouldn't swim the length of the pool, and high school swim meets where she was breaking records and taking state.  I think back on the warm summer days that seemed to last forever with nothing to do but play with my babies.  I think of the talks in her bed every Sunday morning, listening to every detail of the date the night before.  I remember the barbie jeep that she drove summer after summer until it would no longer move.  The tea parties for all of the little girls in the neighborhood that just adored her.  The parking lot that we spent hours, and I mean hours at, trying to teach her how to drive a stick.  I remember playing dress up and school and store, I remember crafts and creative writing.  I remember every moment.

Sometimes I feel like this blog is all about how my children are growing up too fast and how I want time to slow down, but these past few days I have been feeling something totally different.  I have realized that although time goes by fast, I have enjoyed the moments.  I have been given the blessing of being here for her first step, her first lost tooth, her first bad grade, her first speeding ticket, her first break-up...for all of her firsts, and seconds, and twenty fifths.  I have realized that when she has a question or a fear, when she needs someone to cry to, or to talk to, it is me that she has always called.  I'm not patting myself on the back, I have made SO SO many mistakes, but she loves me through them, and forgives me for them, and at the end of the day she is, and always will be, my little girl.

So the planning has begun, the dress has been bought, the golf club reserved.  A new chapter in our family begins. And I am so thankful, so so thankful that I have been lucky enough to be her mom.