Reflecting on the swift passage of family milestones

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My oldest daughter, Sophie, turned 13 last month (a teenager! Heaven help me).

We just celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.

Add the fact my youngest, Annabelle, turned 10 a few months ago, and I am surrounded by milestones.

We’re going to see Louis Tomlinson in concert this summer, and the name of his tour is something I keep asking myself lately:

“How Did We Get Here?”

Everyone talks about the speeding up of time and how “the days are long but the years are short.” I’m not the first parent to feel this way, but wow, does it seem like it’s just smacking me in the face extra hard lately.

It only seems like two years ago we celebrated my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I was in college. Spoiler alert: it was almost 30 years ago.

How did we get here, to my parents’ 50th anniversary, already?

I was talking to Annabelle’s teacher before a recent field trip — the one that is a tradition for our fourth graders — and she remembered how my dad had chaperoned Sophie’s class when she went.

“That was just last year, right?” her teacher said.

Nope. Three years ago.

How did we get here?

Sophie and I were talking about how the eighth graders from her kindergarten year were now about halfway through college, and she said, “well, I’ll be going to college in just five years.”

And I look back to where she was five years ago and it seems like five minutes ago, and it hits me just how fast those five years ahead will pass.

Side note: I have to keep reminding her not to be in such a hurry to get to high school and college and “grown-up life,” because I’m sitting here on the other side wondering where all those years went for me, but as any parent knows, that cautioning is futile.

How did we get here?

Heck, how did we get to almost the end of another school year already? Mother Nature has been in a very good mood this spring, unlike last spring, so we’ve had very few rainouts for sports. Which is glorious and wonderful and I am exceedingly grateful, but it also made the seasons go by even faster.

Last weekend was our last soccer game and it seems like we just started. And in just a few months, Annabelle will start her fifth-grade season of soccer, which is her last year of rec soccer. She was just in K-1 soccer a minute ago, wasn’t she? Sophie was playing her fifth-grade season just last year, wasn’t she?

How did we get here, indeed.