Hold Your Babies Tight

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Az, wondering why her brother was sitting with a blanket on his head. (He didn't want me to take a picture of him, another reason why I am doing Project 52 with him rather than Project 366.)

Today I got the opportunity to get my hands on a yearbook from the high-school I was pretty sure many of the kids I had worked with for my student-teaching went to. I had been curious to see what they looked like for some time. They were in fourth grade when I did my student teaching, and played a rather significant role in my life at the time. I brought Z on over-night field trips with them and the two of us crashed a couple of their fifth grade trips the next year. Two of my students even came to Z's fifth birthday party. I managed to keep tabs on most of the kids through their sixth grade year but once they entered junior high school I lost touch with most of them. I had lost track of how much time had passed and sort of expected them to still be in junior high, but when I thought more about it I realized they could even be in high school now.

As it turns out, they're sophomores in high school. Which is mind-blowing. It doesn't seem like that much time could have possibly passed. I'm not blown away by the fact that Z is turning eleven in a couple weeks; I feel like the two of us earned every moment of those eleven years. I've been there to watch those eleven years go by day by day. I lost track of my fourth graders though, and now all of the sudden they are neither mine nor in elementary school. Most of them seem to be progressing much in the way I would hope, or at least in the way I might have expected, but there was one girl whom I had been particularly fond and close to whom was sporting quite a bit of teenaged attitude and a bit more makeup and less clothing than I would have anticipated. It was yet another not-so-gentle reminder that I need to cherish every single day with my kids, because as they say, the days are long and the years are short.