Oh how time can fly

    There are several BIG moments in everyone's lives that sometimes you don't realize until they are right upon you.
    I had/am having one of those moments... well I am sharing it with several other people. And I still can't believe it is happening.

    5 years ago, during my freshman year of high school, on March 29th, 2010 at around 4p.m., my little sister came into the world the same way she is living in it, kicking. I was walking home from an after school rehearsal when my dad called me and told me the news, and I all but demanded to be taken to meet her.
    Now this summer, she will embark on the longest, and probably the most demanding journey in a huge chapter of her life. School.
    My little sister, who I would travel the ends of the Earth for, has become a little girl who doesn't need to be carried anymore, who can feed herself, knows how to work my camera and doesn't need help with getting dressed anymore. Where has the time gone?
    I could have sworn that it was just yesterday that we had met or that she had her first birthday. Now while I am embarking on a personal journey myself, she is embarking on becoming an actual little girl. No more days spent at her grandmother's playing around with her little brother.
    Being 15 years apart hasn't damaged our relationship because as she got older, so did I, as did my maturity towards life so now she won't have someone who is stumbling but someone who is solid in herself. I hope that she takes from me the strength to get her through the downs in life, the strength in whatever faith she may follow, the ability to stand up for herself and others, but most importantly what I hope I can teach her is that you may be weird or people might call you names but that is no reason to conform to what society says is pretty. She should be her own self not just another carbon copy.
    Every time I look back on that point so many years ago when they broke the news to me that I would be a big sister, I am ashamed of the hurt I felt because I wasn't going to be Daddy's Little Girl any more, I would have to share that spot. Now that I am older and have kind of left the nest, I cannot thank God enough for blessing me with her because she makes me realize different things: the humiliation of thinking I would be pushed to the side when she arrived, the reminder to act like a little kid sometimes, and the humbleness of having someone looking up to me.
    This is just the start of an amazing journey in which for her there will be tears, laughs, heartache, headaches, friends and enemies, ups and downs, but the next 12 years will be what shapes her the most and I am so excited to see the kind of young lady she will become.
    XOXO,