The Little Things

Sometimes I think about the time, years from now, when my girls are grown and beautiful and I am not involved in every bit of their daily lives.

Sometimes this thought scares me.  Sometimes I wonder how much they would hate me if they knew that I am already planning on camping outside their bedroom door, my ear to the floor pressed against that crack between the door and the carpet when their girlfriends come over, or how I plan on bringing in first popcorn, then soda, then napkins, just to have something to bring me into the room every five minutes when they have a boy over.  Which of course, he will only ever be on the opposite end of the couch in the living room.

And sometimes when Hallie hasn't stopped talking in two hours I think those days might be a relief, but sometimes I love that I know all of the little inner workings of her mind.  And yet, I can already feel her slipping away and becoming her own person independent of me and what I expose her to.

Hallie has recently been singing a song she calls "Pirates to Choose" and the lyrics are as follows: Pirates to choose on earth.  The Lamanite had a bandaid, but the crab came and gave him a sticker.  For computers. On earth."  She likes to sit at the piano, and play a sweet little melody, and she and Hanna and I sing this little song.  Tonight I learned that at church Hallie has been learning a new song, and it has a line in it about the "power to choose" that we have "on earth".  And a light bulb clicked on in my head.  Suddenly this song we'd been singing at home wasn't some random thing that she cooked up in her brain to amuse me with, but it was her attempt at remembering what she had learned at church.  I had no idea.

I was going through the pictures on our camera, and came across this little gem.  I just assumed that Hallie was being silly, and I laughed a little when I showed it to Devin.  He said, "Oh, she's being King Benjamin on the tower."  And I was so sad that I wasn't there, that I didn't know that she knew that story enough to pretend that, and that I didn't recognize it as anything more than just a cute little moment in her life.  Which, of course, it was... but still.