Growing older is a strange prospect.  I still feel like an awkward teenager in so many ways (who let me have a house, a mortgage, a kid and a job?!), yet so vastly different than who I was just a few years ago.  Time passes in an infinitely more disconcerting manner once a child enters the mix.  And for some reason, every year that passes since I hit 30 seems a little heavier.  Maybe because 40 is looming just around the corner and seriously I just cannot be closing in on 40.  Fall has always been my favorite time of year, I think as a child because I knew my birthday was coming, the Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  As I’ve aged the smells, the colors and the crisp air have become my favorite part.  I spend far more time outside in the fall than the summer yet somehow this fall I’ve missed out.  So today, after her nap we headed to a conversation park within walking distance and spent the golden hour hiking around.  I even took a few photos of the park itself, as did she.  I’m beginning to think this kid is going to need her own DSLR sooner than I expected.  She’s definitely the piece that keeps me feeling young yet leaves me feeling old at the end of the day.  I’m hoping we get a few more days like today to squeeze in more of autumns magic.

   
    
  She has been asking for a big bed for a while.  She’s shared ours since she was three months old, and we decided to let her continue until she was ready for a change.  As she’s been asking over and over, it seemed like time.  For some reason, I got it in my head that I would build her a bed frame.  So build it I did.  It was simultaneously easier and more difficult than I had imagined.  I used the pieces of her crib for the head board and bed rails.  I also decided that her room needed to be painted and completely reorganized.  The dog statues , were decorations I painted for her second birthday party last year.  We keep adding pins to her fabric drawers, as she collect new ones, the newest from the heart walk this year.  And the drawing of the little girl with the bunny.   It was drawn by nurses in the NICU when she was an infant, and has hung on our bedroom wall since.  I planned to move it to her room once she moved in as well.  So finally it hangs in its rightful place.  It’s followed her bedside from the NICU to the PICU, to our bedroom, and finally her own.  As does the dream catcher made by my cousin, which hung above her isolette in the NICU as well.  The ukulele was a Christmas gift from her Papa, a surprise for me as well, which brought me to tears on Christmas morning.  And the animals, are souvenirs of her visits to the hospital, as she’s visited the gift shop on every trip.  This kid has so much stuff.  But it feel extra special to have her own room, completed , where she has spent the last week sleeping.  Now I just have to stop worrying about her falling out of bed and sleep in my own bed again. 

   
 We went to the pumpkin patch today, the same one we visit every year, and she wore the same sweater she wore two years ago (somehow I can’t find photos of last year).  She was so excited to pick out the pumpkins herself and even more so to arrange them around the yard once we got home.  I love this kid, more and more every single day.