Milestones in Our Cycle of Life

By Fran McNabb

With the school year beginning, I started thinking about all the milestones we go through in our lives. As parents we celebrate, we worry over, and we look forward to those events that our children and we go through.

The beginning of school is one of those events. When our babies walk into a classroom for the first time, they begin a new cycle in their young lives. They might still be babies in our eyes, but they have taken on another role. They are little people eager to learn about and to experience what life has to offer. Their minds are like tiny sponges ready to soak up new information—and what new information there is now out there!

When my generation started the first grade, some of us had never been to kindergarten. We went in with blank minds waiting to be taught the things that today most of our children already know. Educational TV programs for little ones, involved parents, and daycare programs teach our babies things that many of us didn’t know until we started first grade.

My grandson just entered preK for 4-year olds. Like a lot of children, he learned to maneuver through apps on the iphone and ipad when I was still trying to figure out how to turn those devices on. It is amazing the things that little boy already knows, and it’s even more amazing to know what he will learn in the years ahead of him in school.

Life is made up of many milestones: entering and then graduating from school, going to college, finding the perfect partner for life and then getting married. That little boy will one day find his own perfect partner and together they will start their own cycle. They will have their own babies and will celebrate their own events in life.

I hope my husband and I are around long enough to see this little fellow through many of the special events in his lifetime. From one generation to the next, the cycle of life goes on. The older generation might have already gone through most of their milestones, but how rewarding it is to watch our children and their children go through theirs.

Fran McNabb lives on the Gulf Coast with her husband. Her two sons and two grandsons live elsewhere, but getting together with family is important to her. Several of her books include children and their role in the family. Visit her website at www.FranMcNabb.com.