Here comes the bride

If you have a taste for slightly ridiculous and incredibly sentimental, stop reading now.

Okay, either you are just curious and will scoff at me later or you yourself can be ridiculously sentimental and will understand what I'm going to write.

This morning Ella was dressing up (for the aforementioned Princess Dance Along Studio) and had on a very over-the-top and adorable pink, pink, pink fairy dress when she asked me for help putting on some head gear to go with it. Turns out it was the veil, which flows from a jewel studded headband, that my sister gave her last year for Christmas (in the context of other dress-up clothes.)

With a flourish, I swished it over her head, her eyes wide with anticipation as I secured it on her head and my life flashed before my eyes. Suddenly those gentle curls of a child were the sophisticated locks of a woman as I imagined her all grown-up, requesting assistance to get her bridal veil placed just so. And as I pictured her as a woman, my mind was latched on to this image of her as a little girl playing dress-up and me, her mom wondering how it all went so fast.

Then she said, "It's like I'm getting married, isn't it?"

My breath caught and all of sudden my heart ached, missing all the moments in between my little girl and the grown-up woman- all the moments we haven't yet had but yet I pine for just the same.