Those Schoolgirl Days, of Telling Tales and Biting Nails are Gone

You'll have to excuse me tonight, but my baby just started high school, and that fact apparently just turned me into one sad, sorry sap. I'll get over it until the next time, of course, but for now, I'm just going to sit in amazement at how fast this child rearing shit goes. I know everyone talks about it, but seriously. One minute, they're all cute and sweet and wearing clothes that you sewed, dyed and hand painted, without a complaint, a sigh, an eye roll, or the most dreaded - Ewwww, gross!

Then the next thing you know, they're old enough to be fighting over the fact that there's only one pink plastic guitar.

Next they're either happily or not so happily posing for photos on the Pagliai's building fire escape...

...And smashing snow on each other's heads.

Soon their grade school days are numbered and they're actually, kinda, sorta liking each other sometimes.

While other times, they assume their roles as long suffering older sister to the younger's obnoxious, goofball.

Suddenly, they're both young women. Still dorky and driving each other nuts most of the time, but also looking out for each other. At Stinky's sleepover, Coadster sat down with Stinky and all of her incoming freshmen friends and instructed them on the ins and outs of high school. She told them which parking lot to avoid, where they should sit in the cafeteria if they didn't want to get targeted by the territorial upperclassmen and which of the girls in high school were fakey, heinous bitches and not to be trusted. Then she dealt out her last, most important advice, "Stay away from the the junior and senior boys. They will be all over you guys because they know you all have low self-esteem and they can talk you into a bunch of stuff you shouldn't even know about right now." Amen to that, sister. I think Coadster covered it all pretty well.

Here is a photo that was taken this morning when Coadster's friends came to pick her up to start her junior year. She's known the girl sitting next to her since they were born. Awww.