First Phone

We are dealing with some scary medical stuff at our house this week - scarier than usual - so it has been a little hard to focus on the unfolding beauty that is our lives together in all of its tiny growing manifestations.  We do try, though.  I notice the little corn plant on the edge of the grass by the street as we walk into the Lone Star Baby's school; it has somehow escaped from the corn they have planted inside the fences to be free, liberated corn out on its own in the world.  My bean plants have sprouted so quickly.  The teaching assistant from the Lone Star Baby's preschool who cared for her in morning care and was the person I entrusted her to on all those difficult mornings when I had to leave my toddler unhappily behind turned up in morning care at the Lone Star Baby's school...dropping her own first grader off, a child who was an infant back in the latter days of the Lone Star Baby's morning care at the preschool. It was so nice to see her.

And, of course, whatever else is going on, the march of the Lone Star Baby's creeping adolescence and growing independence makes its little steps inexorably forward.  One step that she is quite taken up with these last few days is her first cell phone. Had she started sixth grade at the big middle school like she wanted to this year, I would have gotten her a cell phone and paid for its upkeep as I would have felt we needed it to stay in safe enough contact while trying to get her safely home from school in whatever kind of arrangement we had cobbled together.  Since I was not comfortable with the idea of such cobbling and have made her stay at the little Montessori charter (I know - charter schools are wrong), I did not think she needed a phone.  She really wanted one, though, and asked if she could pay for a pay-as-you-go flip-phone and minutes for herself out of birthday money and allowances. After we talked rules and the total absence of privacy required by me, I agreed, and now she has a trac-phone and is learning how to text old school with the numbers and having a wonderful eleven-year-old girl time with it. It's adorable.

I am trying to remember to treasure everything and I am praying a lot.