i miss my baby girl. well, i guess she's not a baby anymore - she'll be 18 in 3 months - and i do have a younger girl that probably qualifies for "baby girl" more than she does since youngest is the baby of the family. but kitten will always be my baby girl in my head for some reason. i love all my kids, but there has always been something a little stronger between kitten and i. and i miss her. a lot.

oh, i think we did the right thing, letting her stay in cali to finish out high school. it is her last year. it would just have been wrong to uproot her, take her away from her friends and her dance company, and give her grades a kick in the wrong direction by moving her out to georgia with the rest of us. but knowing that didn't make it any easier to let her go. i wasn't ready to let her go - i was supposed to have another year with her.

i can still feel her oh so tight hug and see her running after us down the street the day we left. i can still see the tears and still want to brush them away and give her her mama's love.

and i know it's been hard for her this year. dad does his best, but there are things a girl can only talk to her mother about. and dad isn't always "available" in other ways. he and i have been very lucky that she was raised with a good head on her shoulders. she makes her mistakes, but she is a responsible girl. she has her mother's smarts and strength too. she is more talented than she knows, she just needs a dose of confidence.

she still has some growing to do, but most of it is stuff she can only learn on her own. and, in a lot of ways, she already is making those steps into adulthood. i just wasn't ready for her to be there yet. i wanted my last year with her. my last year to mama her the way a girl needs to be mamaed. i know her father and, while he wouldn't let anything happen to her as long as he could prevent it, he's definitely much more of a hands off parent than i am. i know she's making decisions she probably shouldn't have to make alone yet, probably without much input from dad.

maybe a year wouldn't have changed anything. maybe i would feel like this even then. but i knew i was trying to work myself out of a job with her - as i am with all my children. it's my job to raise them well enough that when they turn 18, i can let them go and they'll be able to live in the real world as responsible adults (well, as responsible as an 18 year old can get, any way). but my time with kitten was cut short and i didn't have the time to prepare my heart for the loss of an entire year. and i grieve for the loss of that time with her.

we're not doing christmas this year. no tree, no decorations, no presents. except one.

two days after christmas i will get to see my baby girl for the first time since we left cali. i wonder how she will have changed? it's been a year of phone calls only. sometimes i get to see her on the webcam, but that's not the same (and it's way dark). on the 27th, i get to see her again, to hold her again. as the day draw closer, it gets harder to not think about it. it gets harder to wait.

i miss my baby girl and she's coming out to see us for christmas. waiting is the last thing i want to be doing right now.