Babies Don't Keep

Cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
for babies grow up we've learned to our sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs and dust go to sleep.
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

I don't know who to give credit to for authoring that poem, but I remember reading it on my mom's wall a bazillion times growing up.  It was one of those cutesy yarn pictures that I'm sure must have been popular in the 70's, but the message is still relevant today: our kids grow up too fast.

Our culture is putting more and more pressure on our kids to make them feel like they need to grow up and be mature and sexy and everything that a kid shouldn't really have to worry about, too soon. There are a ton of books on it now in both the secular and religious realms, and, on this topic anyway, they seem to agree.  It's not good.  

We were invited to a movie night at some friends' house this past weekend to watch a kid type movie (The Good Dinosaur to be exact--which was good and sweet and had some hard topics, but I'm not a movie review blog, so I'll let you watch it on your own.) with some other kids.  The trick was that most of the other kids were at least 4-5 years younger than my youngest, which was the one available to attend the gathering.  While she values these friendships because she gets to feel like the big sister, and they are good family friends, I wasn't sure she would want to attend this time because she is almost officially a pre-teen.  To my surprise, she was more than excited to go when I asked her.

Get your "cuddles" expression here.

As I watched her hang out with her "little" friends, it was really cool because it didn't take long for her to shed her "babysitter" mentality and just settle in with hanging out.  It was no pressure.  It was just fun and just getting to be silly with some other kids.  It's not that I want her to always be just a kid because someday she will have to "adult" on her own, but I'm glad we took time to just play and hang and be silly.  Even within her own group of peers, we are already starting to see the jockeying for position and one-upmanship.  Yuck.  Play, sweet girl.

What times do you recall being glad you just stopped and played?  Do you still do that as an adult?  I readily admit I don't do it often enough, but I'm always glad when I do.

Make it a beautiful day, friends!

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