Time flies.

Is it really 5 years ago that I was great with my first child? FIVE years that I have been a mother?? I look at Grace today and am stunned at how quickly time has gone by. It seems just yesterday that I was up in the middle of the night with my newborn, reading the latest installment of Harry Potter while nursing her back to sleep. Just yesterday that a huge 3 -4 foot stork came to visit and walk around in my pool when Grace was just a few days old. My mom and I think he was making sure all was well at our home.

When Grace was just a few weeks old, I recall meeting my friends with their newborns at the Cocoa Village park. We strolled through the park, talking about motherhood and how it had changed us and what we were anticipating. One friend said, "Do you know what I'm most looking forward to? Bubble baths!" It's such a simple thing. And now I think about how we ran out of Bubble Bath a few months ago and I haven't bothered to replace it, thinking of it as unimportant.

My girl is tall and skinny, with curly hair that she hates to have brushed. Her legs are so long that I've suggested she wear bike shorts under her dresses, which she refuses. She loves to play with friends, and she puts on these new high heeled shiny red dress shoes that are 2 sizes too big for her every chance she gets, so that she can tap dance on our wood floor to songs on TV. Her current favorite is a song Big Bird sings when he misses his best friend, Snuffy, on "Elmo Saves Christmas." She wears hair bows and head bands, sometimes all at once, and loves to dress up and be "fancy". She has a closet filled with dresses. I don't know how to break it to her that in kindergarten, she must wear the school uniform: Khaki shorts or skirts, with a leather belt, and solid navy, green or white polo shirts. I'm sure she'll find a way to fancy it up--probably with elaborate hairbows and pins.

Her last day of preschool was yesterday. When I picked her up from school, I almost cried. I didn't--but it was a very close call. To reflect on the past 5 years and realize that my girl is starting kindergarten in the fall is quite a reality check. Time goes by so quickly--the present is so fleeting. How much time have I wasted worrying about tomorrow or dwelling on the past? Today is all I have. CS Lewis talks about this concept in the Screwtape Letters, where in a demon is advising a subordinate how to trip up humans:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself,or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. . . . We sometimes tempt a human. . . to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. . . . It is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. . . . Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future, too--just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. . . He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity, washes his mmind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.

Oh, to be the ideal human. Steven Curtis Chapman sings a song called, "Miracle of the Moment."