Seize the bottles, and the day.

After watching an episode of Nanny 911 that shook me to my core, I've decided that sippy cups are some sort of crack for preschoolers that must be banished forever one night after everyone's sleeping. Seems like a job for a distant cousin of the tooth fairy.

On my way to that ultimate goal, I went through the drawers tonight and threw away all the old sippy cups with deep indents in the lids from Sawyer gnawing on them for the past two years and stains from juice that sat too long. I also took the final leap and chucked all the poisonous plastic I never bothered to get rid of when the BPA plastic scare hit last year. And then, I threw away every last baby bottle in my house. Arden is fully graduated to sippy cups (and has four fresh cups all her own with Princess Fairies instead of CARS on them).

The throwing out the bottle thing felt like a really big deal. It made me realize that I'm almost done with a whole phase of parenting: Babies. Standing in the grocery store line today the woman behind me who was cooing at Arden looked up and said: "It'll be over before you can blink. They grow up so fast." I must hear some version of this comment from somebody, somewhere, every time I leave the house with the kids. I don't know if it's because I live in a place where the median age lingers around 68, or if this is the just one piece of wisdom that everyone in the world happens to agree upon. As a result, it's a message that's been pounded into my head: "Enjoy it while you can. It flies by. Before you know it they'll be headed off to college." It makes me think of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society standing behind the class whispering "C-a-r-p-e D-i-e-m . . . "