They Grow Up SO FAST...

It seems like only yesterday Darcy was wearing her daddy's hat or bunny ears! Back in March of 1997 (at the ripe old age of 20 months) she was finally beginning to get a little bit of hair to frame that perfect little face of hers! We were just getting past the phase where her thin scattering of hair would stand up straight off her head like the fuzz of a baby bird! She was already entertaining us with funny remarks in her perfectly pronounced, amazingly large vocabulary. Hearing such big words coming from such a little girl, always made folks out on the street do a double take!

Back in those days, Darcy would ASK me to take her picture and even suggest poses and good backgrounds for said photos! Now-a-days, I find myself reduced to trying to scavenge some of her self-portraits off her facebook page...with no success, I might add! I have come to the conclusion after many futile attempts this morning that there is NO WAY you can copy photos off facebook or print them. Which is really too bad, since my daughter no longer lets ME take her photo, but seems to take plenty of photos of herself (holding the camera out at arm's length) and then doctoring them up with interesting tints and writing comments across them before she posts them to her facebook page.

After shadowing about on facebook for several months now, I have come to the conclusion that we are raising a sound-bite generation. Our children are used to snippets of conversation and quick flashes of information. Abbreviated one-liners sent via IM has replaced the long hand-written letters of my generation. Grainy, spontaneous images from cell phone cameras have replaced the less frequent film photographs of my generation. Everything is served up so much faster and with so much less detail. I can honestly say that my daughter demonstrated far superior writing abilities as a nine year old than she seems capable of now as a 13 year old. She had better grammar as three year old than she has now as a 13 year old. She had better spelling as a six year old (she was quite an accomplished speller) than she apparently possesses now as a 13 year old. Having your child turn into a teenager is hard on a mother!!!

I tried to end this post with a few of Darcy's more recent self-portraits off her facebook page...but, alas, facebook is a secret world that people over 45 have trouble figuring out...maybe there IS a way to copy and paste photos off facebook, but I have given up! I can't figure out how! I'm sure if DARCY were here, she would roll her eyes at my helplessness and run through the instructions so quickly that I would remain just as lost as I started out being(!)...but, alas, she is not here. She and a busload of her friends left for a MOGWOG (Men of God, Women of God) retreat last night. Which is why her mother is here...thinking wistfully about the simpler days when she was too young to go galavanting off on her own....and too young to know it wasn't cool to write in long, well composed, grammatically correct, vocabulary rich, perfectly spelled sentences. She is a fun teenager...nearly always pleasant...very helpful...has a sweet attitude and is a genuine joy...but, even so, her mother still misses those days before she became cool!

Post Script: (Emma and Eric, thank you both for helping me figure out how to pull the photos off facebook! I SHOULD have been able to figure this out myself, but sometimes I tend to be a bit technically challenged!!!)