Double Digits!

My oldest turned 10 today. It's amazing how convoluted our sense of time can be: in some ways it seems the 10 years it's been since her birth and our debut to parenthood. In other ways I look back on all that Bub has accomplished and the maturity she's achieved and feel like it was just yesterday that I was weaning her from her binky. Time is such a fickle friend in that way. At her Well-Child exam a few weeks ago, I nearly fell off my chair when the doctor brought up that she hasn't started puberty yet. That brought out a whole range of thoughts, worries, and lists of things to do in preparation of those ungainly years. Truly, they do grow so amazingly fast and it's a miracle we have any time to spend with them before they're out the door and learning lessons about the capricious nature of Time.
We enjoyed celebrating Bub's entrance to the double digits. We got her a nice rolling backpack from L.L. Bean to haul her ever growing pile of texts to and from school. We also made our pre-birthday trip to the thrift store for the girls to pick out presents for her. (If you knew how outrageously awesome our thrift stores are, you'd never buy even sale items except under duress.) As the cherry on top, we ordered some Chickend Korma w/naan (her fave food) and Derek took them to the park (while I napped my life away)...
Love you, my responsible, helpful, cheerful perfect-as-the-oldest daughter...