Growing Up

Patriot's day was inexplicably 90 degrees and sunny, despite being in the middle of April.  While most of Boston went to see the marathoners persevere (or pass out from heat exhaustion), we took Elsie to the beach and wore her out running in and out of the surf with her best friend, Killian. 

We arrived home with the lass sound asleep in her car-seat.  Hub managed an extremely rare successful car-to-bed transfer, and there she lay, on her big-girl bed, still salty and sandy and wrapped in a towel, sound asleep.

It had been weeks since her last nap.  After many months of denial, I had finally come to accept that naps were a thing of the past for us.  I feel strongly that a two-year-old should still be taking naps, that she still needs them, but dear Elsie failed to ask me my opinion on the matter and stopped napping anyway. Oh well.

There's this tenacious grasping that I do as a parent sometimes.  Perhaps it's a first-child thing, or perhaps it's a control-freak mom thing, or perhaps it's just the way we are all with all of our kids.  Naps are one manifestation for me, a thing that I want to hold on to, that I want to last just another year more, that I feel my daughter isn't possibly ready to move beyond.  But she is ready, and she is moving beyond, and it doesn't matter if it is annoying or inconvenient or if it requires flexibility and growth from me as her mom or if it makes me sad, because it is inevitable.  As it should be.

There's this sweetness around nap time.  It's the only time Elsie still sucks her thumb, a habit that worried me so much as a new mom, but that I find so melting now.  She lies there, hair sticky to her forehead, cheeks flushed like a china doll, lips pink as can be, and she just rests. Her eyelids are blue when she naps.  Her skin is the smoothest I've ever seen.  Her breath is sweet as honeysuckle.

When I went upstairs to rouse my Little Miss from her slumber that lovely beach day, I brought the camera.  I never want to forget the way she looks when she's napping, or the way she looks when she wakes up.  Flushed pink, she blinks a few times, sees me looking back at her, and smiles a lazy, happy grin. 

Love doesn't even begin to describe it.