The hopes under my pillow

So, Naomi lost her first tooth yesterday. It's the bottom middle-right, and the left is already loose. I missed it, but I'm told that she was very excited and talked of nothing else the entire day. A great deal of attention and thought was given to how exactly to ensure the tooth's safe dispatch to the tooth fairy. She finally decided on a box within a box under her pillow. The twoonie received in payment was almost completely ignored - she was just relieved that the tooth was picked up.

It seems too soon. Ben is two years older and he just started to lose his teeth last year, but it's not about the timing. She's my baby and this means more than just a tooth under a pillow. I thought that I could find a way to write about my kids growing up that didn't sound cliche or overly sentimental, but I'm not having much luck.

I can't wait to find out what they will be like when they get older, I am so curious about who they will become, what they will be passionate about, who their friends will be, what they will accomplish.

But I don't want them to be any older than they are at this very moment, when everything is fun and people are all nice to them and they invent games and make up stories and laugh and sing with abandon and crawl into bed with me and cuddle up and tell me their dreams. At this moment they are perfect. They are not limited by anything.

I don't want them to lose this moment, this feeling of everything being possible. Faster than I can believe, I know that the spaces between parents and children appear and are filled with new interests and people and independence. It's what has to happen, parents move further back, taking on more distant supporting roles, guiding gently and hoping that the basic things that we teach them when they are so close are enough to help them make decisions that make them happy later on. Some days I'm proud of the job I'm doing, other days I feel like I'm failing.
But right now, they are still perfect and it's so easy to keep them safe and make them happy and fill them with confidence so they can create the beautiful things they do.

And I don't want that to come to an end, even though I know it has to.