Tempus Fugit

Boy does time fly. Here is proof. Just a little while ago I was sending my baby boy off to Kindergarten and now the whole picture frame is full. I bought two of these school days frames from the Pottery Barn store at the Mall in Sacramento over a year ago, around Thanksgiving, 2004. They sat in a bag in my closet for over a year because I was busy doing a few other things. I could never quite grab block of time to devote to putting pictures in the frames. Well on New Year's Eve this year the earth shook. Both of my kids were occupied elsewhere, Chuck was busy with a football game or something and I found myself with a block of uninterrupted time to collect and frame school pictures.

I was a little concerned because during the first two years of homeschooling, I hadn't quite found a group that took school pictures. So I'm missing third and fourth grade school pictures. But I did have a little league baseball picture and an acting headshot from those years and they fit the bill nicely.

Sometime during the process of putting the pictures in order, I realized with a shock that the entire frame was full. It brought tears to my eyes. My baby boy is no longer a baby, he's a red-blooded American teenager, with the attitude and long hair to prove it. When I was growing up in the seventies, I certainly never imagined I'd be fighting my own son about haircuts. But it's happened.

It's not that I dislike long hair. When I was a teenager I only dated guys with long hair. When Eric was a toddler, I let his hair grow. The first haircut was more traumatic for me than for him. The only reason I agreed to get his hair cut was that I was tired of hearing people say, "Oh what a cute little girl". So it's not that I object to long hair. I just want him to keep it neat looking and that means a trim every now and then is a necessity.

So anyway, time does fly. Now I'm the older generation. Now my son is getting ready to enter High School. He's thinking about SATs. His school days frame which holds pictures from kindergarten to eighth grade is all filled up. Where does the time go?