Windows Slammed Shut

It seems I keep having life revelations at Peter Piper Pizza. Maybe it’s because we spend so much time at this very fine eating establishment these days. We recently dined there, and the meanie mommy rule that I have there is that you eat first, then you can run around the kiddy interpretation of a casino, playing the rip off games, or climbing on the ultra-pathogen infested indoor playground equipment. But only after you have quasi-eaten to my satisfaction.

My kids wolfed down their synthetic cheese pizza to my delight, and were salivating at the awaiting golden tokens they would gamble away, all in the hopes of winning a crappy, plastic toy that would be added to the mountains of useless junk in our overflowing playroom.

Patty quickly blew through her tokens, and went to climb up the jungle gym which lead to a curly-q slide. She stood next to a posted, plastic sign that said, “You must be less than 42 inches to play.” The tippy top of her golden, baby fine hair touched the cutoff line on the sign for playing on the germy equipment. Too big. Too big? It was just yesterday that she was too scared to go up the climbing apparatus at all. I blinked and she finally got enough nerve to go up, but panicked at the top, too frightened to slide down, so I had to haul my way out of shape butt up the tiny, back-wrenching climbing thing and rescue her. And now, in just a blink, she was almost too big for it. It seems like our window for these kid things are closing too quickly for words.

As we waited for Patty to finish sliding down, Cole and I were talking about school lunches. “Who did you sit with at lunch today?” I asked him. “Do you have enough time to eat?” I was curious, since last year, that was a common complaint. He named off a few buddies that he often eats with, and explained, that yes, he has time to eat, but out of nowhere solicited firmly and matter of factly, Cole zinged me with: “Mom, you don’t need to come eat lunch with me anymore. No one does that in 3rd grade. No parents come eat with their kids.” Wham! The window of eating lunch with my first born, at school, was gone forever. Slammed shut.

These windows that continue to close so quickly and unexpectedly have taught me that I guess I need to look at each chance to spend time with our kids as a short term opportunity and a privilege. The one thing that is constant in life is change, but the precious times are so fleeting, I wish I could just freeze time, just for a minute or two.