{nice}

Barclay was out of town this past weekend so my little sister, Elise, came down for a two-night sleepover. Two reasons this was awesome:

1. I'm a grown woman with the alone-in-the-dark tolerance, imagination, and rationalization skills of a three year-old. It's so, so pathetic. It doesn't make very much sense at all that having another girl in the house with me could possibly make me any safer than if I were here by myself - as though burglars and bad guys and boogeymen have a rule about not breaking into houses with two or more adult occupants or something. But it works for me.

2. Elise is headed off to Haiti to volunteer at an orphanage for a little while and I won't see her until Christmas.

So we had a girls weekend. We went to the mall and the farmer's market with Karlie and her girls and we hit up the thrift store just the two of us. She taught me how to make tortillas and we watched Roman Holiday, and we played Ruzzle and had French Toast. And of course I took her to the Science Centre to see the giant animatronic dinosaurs they have there because that's just the kind of thing you take your little sister to see, even if she is actually a grown woman.

She's five years younger than me, Elise is. So even though she's an adult, I guess, it's still pretty weird for me to open the front door and see her standing there, all alone. I always want to pull her in by her shoulders and shake her a little and yell, "DO MOM AND DAD KNOW WHERE YOU ARE? WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE THINKING, DRIVING ALL THE WAY UP HERE ALL BY YOURSELF?"

But she doesn't even live with Mom and Dad anymore. That's weird too. She has a job and an apartment and a car, and she knows how to make really great tortillas from scratch.

It's terrifying. Not the tortillas part, the little-sister-growing-up part.

The everyone-growing-up part. The stuff-changing part. The deepening-lines-in-my-face part and the my-baby-isn't-really-a-baby-anymore part. This morning, I glanced over to where I'd left Sullivan on the floor playing with his trucks and he was standing there with just one hand on the fridge, blinking at me like he wasn't sure what had happened. I stood there blinking right back at him because I wasn't sure either.

Weren't you just born?

I feel like I've been lamenting the passing of time a lot lately. So instead of ending this post with a melodramatic plea to life to slow down for a hot second, I'm going to focus on the fact that the present is actually quite nice; this weekend was nice, seeing the people I love grow and change and thrive is nice, and life in general, as it is right now, is nice also. I guess I'm kind of a rearview mirror type of person, but I'd like to look around and ahead more, lest I miss this amazing scenery whizzing past my window.

So cheers to the breakneck speed of the minutes and the hours.