Time Keeps On Slipping...

The Teen has recently turned 16, and although she's still in the newbie stage of her 16th year, suddenly I am viewing of her as a 16 year old, especially in regards to decisions that make or break her social life. I'm not sure what it is about being 16 that makes a child seem so much older suddenly. Has she changed so much from who she was a couple of weeks ago, when she was 15? No... But a cosmic shift seems to have occurred nonetheless.

The Lily Bug starts kindy in a few weeks and likes to regularly remind me that she is three years old, and next year she will be four. She then sets about planning her fourth birthday party, and reminds me so much of her big sister who was also 4 once upon a time. Before she suddenly became 16. (She leapt from 4 to 16 in 0.12 seconds. Seconds, not years I tell you!) Soon I will have to surrender her to the likes of school. Time is slipping by too fast for my liking.

Guy Smiley has begun singing along to his favourite nursery rhymes. Sometimes he seems to croon in tune, or enough so that you can actually tell which song he is singing. While singing, some of the words come out plain as day even though he won't speak a word outside of 'ta' and 'mama' otherwise (I lie; recently he's begun saying 'dook' for 'look' and 'rah' for 'run'.). During Twinkle Twinkle he'll sing "wah-wah" for "wonder" and during Wheels on the Bus he'll say "rah-rah-rah" for "round and round".

My point to all of this (and I'm oh-so-quickly loosing the point as the time scoots closer to 2am) is that I would like to have moving pictures on a scrap page layout. Or a little doofer that plays for example, a soundbyte of Guy Smiley's singing when you open a flap on the page (like the card Nan bought The Teen for her 16th). Yes that's right, this is where all of my 1am ramblings have lead to. And I think I'm on to something here. Someone needs to make a chipboard-thin LCD screen that you can slot a memory card into, and stick to a scrapbook layout. Is that crazy 1am talk, or am I on to something profitable here? (If so, I have first dibs on the whole All Rights Reserved thing.)

So, at the same time that I'm wishing I could find a way to scrap the little videos I've made of Guy Smiley's singing sessions, The Lily Bug's rolly pollies and that section of time between coming home from school and sitting at the computer, where Char tells me about her day, I'm also painfully aware of how quickly my children are growing up. These cute idiosyncrasies that make them who they are today will change a little tomorrow, and a little more the day after. I will never be able to keep up with or remember them all, much as I try. Every day my children are born again. A little different from the children they were the day before. It is inevitable that unless I can write or scrap daily, I will forget all the many many daily precious moments I tell myself I will remember forever.

And on that note, I'm going to bed. I realise I'm literally squinting at the monitor and wondering why the letters have begun to dance a wee jig across the screen.