Dear A, I'd like to be as brave and athletic as you are. You do cartwheels and handsprings flawlessly, grinning after you're right side up. You do fancy (and frightening!) stunts on your bike, riding without hands, sitting up on your handlebars, doing wheelies like nobody's business. You can cross the monkey bars with playground […]
Dear O, You still remind me of Anne of Green Gables - her wit, her smarts, her strength of mind and character, her propensity for speaking the truth (for better or for worse). Remember the part in the movie where Anne very strikingly seems to be leaving girlhood behind and laughs on the porch alongside […]
Dear K, In the early years, when you were very small, parents with older children would sometimes stop us and knowingly say to us, "Oh, she's so sweet! But...just wait until she's a teenager!" Deep down, I thought that perhaps they were wrong to assume that adolescence was something to be feared or endured. Now […]
Dear H, Sometimes I think back to how we almost didn't have you. We were worried about having the bandwidth to get through another pregnancy with hyperemesis gravidarum - the vomiting, the IVs, the constant nausea, the endless fatigue, the march of days with so much sickness. Thankfully, we pushed our fear outside and locked […]
Dear A, At 9 months old, you were an athletic wonder. We called you a "speed crawler," but you could also stand and climb up and down steps. Before you turned one, you were running. Before two, you were climbing up the highest playgrounds as far as you could go. Now, at age 9, it […]
Dear O, Twelve is a year of change. Once a child, you now study the world around you from a young woman's perspective. You are a beauty, although you certainly don't realize it. Sammy Kershaw's country song comes to mind, "she don't know she's beautiful..." With your glossy blonde hair, piercing eyes, and ready smile, […]