Pigtails

I confess that while I truly loved my baldy baby, I was dying for the day sweet Eliza would be able to wear pigtails. I wore them constantly as a child - called them "ta ta's" which remains one of those stories your parents tell often, always like you've never heard it before. I loved them, and always dreamed of a little girl of my own in pigtails.


I've been trying them off and on for months, to no avail. Just not quite enough hair. Today, after the nap, I managed to triumphantly scrape her bedhead into two scrawny, precious piggies. The tiny sprigs weren't much, but they transformed her in a way I wasn't ready for.



Suddenly all I could see was a little girl. Dainty and earnest, toddling around the front yard, pigtails bouncing, holding her Daddy's hand and saying so many big words, real sentences, singing her ABCs. Where has my nonsensically babbling baby toddled off to? The sun has a new bedtime these days, and as it waned into our own bedtime I wished, not for the first time, that I could freeze that moment. The sturdy raspberry Mary Janes, the wispy pigtails, daddy home from work in time for a chat on the porch and a push in the red swing at dusk. "Weeeee!" she cries from the swing.





Me watching from the stoop while I feed precious Genevieve, who turned two months on Sunday and whose huge smiles are growing in number exponentially each day. A small, unremarkable sliver of our every day, but today, it made my heart ache. I know someday I will long for this moment, in a different way than I longed for the pigtails, and wish I could be that tired, shabbily dressed mom on the porch watching my toddler, who seemed so big, and cradling my baby, who seemed so small.


As time marches on, so do we; we march up to bed, to the meltdown that ensues from too much fun in one evening. But I'm putting that moment away for safekeeping. Pigtails. My  first baby, slipping quickly into a little girl.