out with the old ... in with the old

While Saturday was a day spent playing and bonding (John took E to the UVA/UNC game ... A and I had fun and relaxed around the house), Sunday was a frenzy of chores in the Slacker house. We grocery shopped, mowed the lawn, cleaned the house, changed the sheets, and tried to extricate ourselves from a never-ending pile of laundry. And, in deference to the arrival of fall weather (finally!), I switched out the girls summer clothes for fall clothes in their dressers and closets.

There wasn't much to do with E. Since most of her clothes were purchased in the last month or so, it was a matter of finding the holdovers from last year and dumping the bags of new clothes in her drawers. Well, that and hiding her summer dresses from view in an attempt to avoid any "but I wanna wear the sleeveless sundress" arguments like we had on Friday.

For A, this meant going to the spare room for the gigantic bin of E's 2T hand-me-downs. The walk down the hallway was a trip down memory lane for me. The clothes that now sit in A's dressers were the ones that E wore when A was an infant. And, shockingly, it made me a little emotional. Things like this shirt and the matching jeans:

This was one of E's favorites, since the shirt has a fairy on it and the jeans has sparkly things on them. The one complaint we had with them is that it has not one but two buttons at the fly, which thought would be a bitch when potty training E. We didn't have to cross that bridge with E, but we certainly are with A.

I think the thing is, the moment when A was born, E suddenly became the big girl. Sure, she was (and will always be) my baby...but when contrasted to a newborn, an active 2-year-old who walked and talked and could play by herself, she was a *big girl*. Now that A is wearing these clothes, I'm forced to admit that she is really a big girl now, too.

Suddenly, I was struck by how fast time really is flying by. How one minute I'm worried about the sleeping schedule of an infant and balancing life with a baby and a toddler...and now I'm worried about the sleeping schedule of a teething toddler and balancing life with two kids and a job. It's all whizzing by before my eyes and there's nothing I can do to make it slow down.

So I stopped worrying about whether or not everything was perfectly folded in their drawers (especially since they would only stay perfectly folded for 5-minutes)...threw the girls in the stroller, set off for the playground, and enjoyed the rest of a beautiful fall day.