I'll never let you go.

i've always been somewhat of a packrat. as much as i talk about that tv show Hoarders, i must also admit that i too hold onto things for much longer than necessary. things i can't really bring myself to part with. for instance, today i found my mother's living will and advance directives.

"whyyyyyyyyyyyy do i still have this?" asked my rational self.

"because it has my mother's handwriting. it makes her concrete. real." responded my emotional side.

"oh, bullshit," said rational, "you didn't even know you still had it until you just found it in your closet! and you know she was real, you look just like her."

like i said: i'm a packrat.

trying to break the habit before i infect my daughters, i really thought i'd done myself a solid by finally getting their closet organized and by getting rid of the chicks' tiny baby clothes, socks, and shoes. and yet there are a few items that i cannot for the life of me part with. for instance:

Dixie's frog feet pajamas. and the sick part is, every now and then i take them out, hold them up, and hug them, trying to remember the way the tiny little person who wore them felt. its not very effective, especially when that same now-two year old person is dancing around my legs damanding juice and a cookie.

i have at least 5 size 1 diapers just kinda hanging around in the girls' room: one in the top drawer of the changing table, 3 in the wardrobe, and one one the top shelf of their closet. again: how sad is it that i know exactly where these diapers are?

ultrasound photos! just last week i found two photos from August 2007 in my car. under the seat. beside an earring and a petrified french fry. and i couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so i brought them into the house and put them in unfinished baby books....which incidentally have envelopes of ultrasound photos in them, as well as the chicks' hospital bracelets, tarnished silver bracelets with their names on them that i never let them wear, and the happy cards annoucing their birth dates and times from the hospital. . i totally plan on incorporating each of those items in the girls' graduation and wedding annoucements.

Taaaaaaacky ass headbands. somewhere along my pregnancy, some well meaning person who claimed to care about me gave me two packages of the most horrifically tacky headbands i have ever seen. and while my mouth said oh thank you how thoughtful, my mind thought never on the heads of my precious daughters. and i have stuck to this promise.

and that's because i put them on MY OWN heads on the weekends. yes, you heard me. as a matter of fact, just last Saturday i was wearing on and noticed Trixie giving me the "i gotta break eye contact with you right now and stare at your hair because i don't even understand what is happening right here" treatment.

you know the one....

anyway, noticing the break in eye contact, i asked her "hey! you like mommy's headband?"

she said, very seriously and without missing a beat, "no." 

but that's cool. she's two. she doesn't like anything except juice and cookies.

it's really interesting to me that someone who didn't really ever want to have kids and prayed nightly during my maternity leave for time to speed up so i could wake up to toddlers instead of wailling infants now can't seem to let go of the items marking their infancy.

i hope by the time i'm sitting my my car in on the first day of kindergarten crying into a pair of frog feet pajamas, i will have made peace with my rational self. i don't need her giving me shit over the size 1 diapers i'll have in my glove box.