Bittersweet Memories

I'm getting ready to put together a slide show highlighting my daughter's life. I need this to be ready by Nov. 1 when we have a bon voyage gathering at church to celebrate her joining the Peace Corps and going off to Kenya for the next 2 years.

Ever since she was very little, I've been saving mementos in a box. I was going through the box the other day and I came across this paper that I had forgotten about. In 1987 I traced my hand, my daughter's hand and my newborn son's hand. How was I so clever? I'm not usually so creative, but thank God I did this. It's so special. I should probably have it laminated too.

I spent a lot of years being a mommy, and I'm really glad to be done now, but when I see something like this that reminds me of the really good times, I get sad and miss those days. The thing I miss most is reading to them at bedtime. It was a ritual, one that we all loved. When I said, "okay, it's time to read", they couldn't get up the stairs fast enough--that's when we cuddled on the bed and bonded.

Although we read lots of different books, my favorite, and theirs too it seemed, as they got older, was the Shel Silverstein series. Every time I read one of those books, it was me who would say, "wait, just one more story" and it could be 1/2 hour or more past bedtime before I would force myself to put the book down. They loved it as much as I did.

So as my daughter returns from Hawaii in a few days, and we spend some time together before she leaves for Kenya, this paper will remind me that, just as I held her hand in mine when she was little, she'll be in my heart while she's away, now that she's grown.