Hello, I am the bride

This is such a silly picture, which documents a silly moment. This silly moment happens the exact same way twice a day, and has for the past couple of months. Honestly, it has happened pretty much this same way for the past three and a half years, but just with the same commentary the past two months. The exercise of taking one's shirt off.

Incredibly routine. And without exception since I can remember dressing Sadie, has happened when I was in a hurry. Who gets a three year old dressed with a leisurely attitude? Not at this house. I was always hurrying,  to (a) get to the office, (b) get Sadie to school, or (c) on the weekends, get Sadie to a daddy-daughter-date morning so I could go exercise. We might have leisurely breakfasts any of those mornings, or morning play times, or story times... but getting dressed time was never fast enough for my liking. Not sure why it turned out like this -- for there have been enough mornings over the last three and a half year that this child has woken up before the sun and we have had ample time to get dressed in slow motion and without stress... but that has never happened.  I have lingered over plenty of cups of coffee, but never over getting her dressed.

And then in the evenings... somehow we seem to hurry through the getting undressed and back into pajamas with the same sort of hurry. We slow down for stories (we read four books every night and then I tell her two stories on top of that... so we are well practiced in 40 minute plus bedtime routine). And Mark has incredible patience with delay tactics in brushing teeth and getting just the right amount of water in a Dixie cup for drinking, or washing her feet to get the remains of Meadow Park dirt off, or finding the moon outside of one of our windows.

But again, the concept of dressing and undressing always seemed rushed.

Until sometime earlier this summer.  Sadie discovered the feeling of taking the t-shirt (or nightgown, as the case may be) most of the way off, but just so the neckline gets caught up around her hairline, just like in this picture. Gone is the panic that a baby or toddler feels when mom (or dad) isn't visible and child is STUCK in the shirt.  Sadie relishes in this simple action now. The feeling of the shirt pushing her thick hair straight back; the feeling of the hem of the shirt or nightgown cascading down her naked back.  The first time she did it, I had to laugh... remembering the feeling I had myself when I did it as a child.  I told her that I loved that feeling too when I was a little girl.

"Hello..." she says, in the exact same tone, every time the shirt is in the exact right place, "I am the bride." 

I stopped hurrying the first time, the very first time she said this.

"Who are you marrying?" I would ask. "You" she replied. The moment was worth it. I froze it in my memory.

Mark will ask her the same question, and without fail, she doesn't vary her answer. "Mommy" is who she is going to marry.  He is lucky, she does agree to invite him to the wedding. But I still get to be the one who she celebrates with first.

I try not to have regrets with Sadie. I have always known, from the moment that we read the pregnancy test, that she was a gift.  But life does happen quickly, and as I admit above, a lot of our routine is indeed, rushed. But not the taking off of the shirt, at least not this summer.  She is elated to be getting married, and if it happens 100 more times like this before the "real event", I will know that I am lucky to witness it, in whatever role she has me.