Today I’m off to go and spend a week with our eldest child. This week coming she turns twenty-one. It’s hard to imagine that twenty-one years have passed since we first held that tiny (or so we thought until we saw everyone else’s babies) 3880g (8lb 9oz) baby in our arms. She had a full head of hair and was unbelievably cute.

Our second child, the youngest, followed just over two years later, and weighed in at an impressive 4365g. (9lb 10oz) He’ll be 19 shortly, and he’s followed his hefty entry into the world by converting it to height, and is now around 186cm tall and looks very spiffy in a tux.

I was reflecting on how fast time seems to pass. It seems impossible that our kids are turning 21 and 19, because it was only a few weeks ago that they were babies. Obviously that impression is completely wrong, but as I’ve got older time seems to be speeding past faster every day.

I mentioned that to my parents recently. They’re 81 and 86, and Dad said “Try being our age if you think it’s fast now!” That suggested to me that it’s a perspective thing so I thought back to when I was a child. Do you remember how long an afternoon could be? Or how the Christmas holidays (7 weeks in Australia then) seemed to be wonderfully endless? Or how Christmas Eve seemed to stretch on for eons?

Now, holidays skip by in an instant, and Christmas Eve seems to be a flurry of activity which only ends when you fall exhausted into bed, still thinking about whether you’ve got everything organised for Christmas morning.

But back to the main thread of this post. Briana is twenty-one on Tuesday. Twenty-one, a young adult with so much still ahead of her. We’ve had twenty-one years to be proud of the young woman she’s becoming – that wonderful, giving, delightful person who goes out of her way to care for others. So Happy Birthday Grubsy! We love you.