Growing Up

There are so many and varied emotions as you watch your kids grow up.  It is an amazing thing to see them become more and more mature, making weighty decisions, thinking about and planning for life as an adult, growing into big, strong bodies.  It is humbling and exciting and scary to watch them grow.  It's also painfully, tragically sad to look back at the pictures of them when they were so little.  When you (as parents) were their whole world.  One of the things that can vividly bring to remembrance the days when they were small is looking at things they used to wear.  Going through a box of 3-year-old clothing can really tug at the heart strings.

One particularly meaningful item of clothing in our family is a pair of flip-flops we bought for Taylor when he was two or three.  When we bought them, they had little palm trees on them, now long since worn away.  These flip flops went through Taylor, Parker, Jessica and Sophi.  Amazingly, they are still wearable and still here.  Hard to believe we never lost one of them.

Last year Christi was going through some old things and getting rid of stuff we didn't need any longer.  She called me down to look at some of the clothes for one last walk down memory lane before we discarded them.  Little striped shirts and jeans and jammies were hard to say good bye to.  But we both had the most difficult time with this pair of flip flops.  I decided to surprise Christi by framing them:).  Hard to believe these once belonged to our 6'4" basketball star!