It's a peculiar feeling when your baby calls from a Chinese buffet in Tomah, Wisconsin.

And she's off! This is a day every mother dreams of. Should I laugh? Cry? Scream? Dance naked on the kitchen table? Make all my favorite foods that my kids used to complain when I made? Or just feel a little wistful for a while. And hopeful. For me and for my babies. It's a bit like giving birth, I suppose. There's the feeling that they're finally OUT, and that IT'S FINALLY OVER. But at the same time, there's the feeling that something that was your own special little secret has been leaked to the world and who knows where it will end? As a continuation of my sharing of old poems (last one, I promise) I'll offer this one that I wrote when Lindsay was a baby. I was following her down the sidewalk one sunshiny morning and it just came over me. It still never ceases to feel true to me on days like this:

I can think of several illustrations that come in handy for today, as well. There's the "Stay at Home Mom" series, of course, but there's also "Let it Go":




and this oldie but goodie from the archives, "Dreams take Flight." Because our children are like dreams -- real yet elusive at the same time, fantastic, full of our comfortable selves but also full of new things our conscious minds could never have imagined.




And lastly, people ask me all the time if this is an illustration of Hannah:




I'm not sure why. Because she is singing? Because she has such dark hair and the cheeks suggestive of two perfect beauty marks? Because she is riding on a bird? I usually smile and say, "I guess it is."
Today, anyway.

Because today somehow the Maxima swallowed up Hannah and ALL of her piles and pulled out of the driveway. She put on an adorably jaunty hat (for courage, she explained) and then . . . POOF!
Good luck, sweetie.
Look out, world. Hannah's home.