Waiting for Christmas

I’ve been wrestling with this question quite a bit, and actually, hiding from what the answer might be. The question is:

“At what point will my children stop being “children” or even “kids” and turn into the dreaded pre-teen, have-an-attitude, don’t-mess-with-me-mom-you’re-not-that-cool, middle-school, tweens that I know are hiding inside of their little bodies?”

A friend of mine gave me some perspective yesterday, and I hope you don’t mind me repeating this, Joanne, but she said this:

“The first half of fifth grade is very different from the second half. In the first half, it’s a lot like fourth grade. But then in the second half, oh boy, watch out. You’d better enjoy Christmas this year, because it’s the last one like it you’ll ever have.”

I’m assuming my friend knows what she’s talking about. She has a daughter who’s in middle school, so she’s been there. And she has another daughter who’s a bit younger, so she knows she’ll have to go through it again.

So I thought, is it really that late? Christmas is only 124 days away, so that’s not really much time to fit in all the fun kid-things that we’ve wanted to do but haven’t had time to schedule. I mean, we haven’t even gone to Disney yet!

On the other hand, I suppose there’s hope in the fact that my friend didn’t say things were BAD after Christmas, she only indicated that they were DIFFERENT. And I know her daughter, she’s sweet and nice.

So I’ve decided not to worry too much about the question I posed earlier. Change will come, and chances are I won’t quite be ready. And if worse comes to worse, I’ll just call my friend Joanne and have her bring her daughter over for a few hours.

At the end of the day, I think I’d rather live with my girls the way they are now and have as much fun as possible instead of waiting for Christmas to get here.