Written by There are so many days when I have to catch myself, take a pause, back up, rewind, and remind myself that Cadence is still very little. She’s not so little in size. I swear the girl grew six inches when Stevie and I left her at Grandma and Papa’s to spend three days in the hospital having Henry. It’s like we came home and she was a completely different kid.
But in spite of the fact that the girl is growing like a freakin’ weed and is a really, really good kid (yeah, she really is, even her pain in the butt moments are few and far between), she’s still our 5-going-on-6-year-old baby girl.
One of the fun things about Facebook is that every now and then a blast from the past photo will pop up. This one hit my newsfeed today, taken four years ago when Miss C wasn’t even 2. I remember it vividly. It was the first day my baby let me put her hair in pigtails, and I couldn’t help but snap a few pictures of the cuteness as she played for hours in the new toy kitchen she’d gotten for Christmas, babbling to herself in her baby voice as she stirred together pretend soups and chatted on the phone to imaginary friends.
I smiled when I saw the photo, and I was just about to hit the Share button, when my baby girl came bounding down the stairs in a tizzy of excitement to show me the gaping hole where one of her baby teeth had been. She’s been waiting for one of them to fall out for more than a year, working the wigglies with her tongue and sometimes rocking them back and forth or tugging on them with her fingers. She’s been watching all of her classmates sporting ever-gaping Jack-o-lantern grins, often wondering aloud if she was ever going to lose her teeth.
And then it happened. She was brushing her teeth tonight when suddenly she felt one of the baby bottoms break lose and slide into the space between her lip and gum. She fished it out and came running to show it off, flashing me her newly-landscaped grin and I felt time stop for a moment as I waited for the camera to focus on the face that was no longer my baby, but my big, growing girl.
Lori Romano 