That's my girl

So my daughter's body has decided to leap into womanhood, despite the fact that she's not even ten and a half. Whether it's the hormones in the milk or a just something insistent in her DNA (she didn't get it from me), she has completed the puberty checklist in what seems like record time. And, oh, how she's grown. On the inside, thank baby Jesus, she's still a kid, not even a wanna-be 'tweener, but the contrast between what she looks like and what she is sometimes makes me think we're in some junior version of the movie Big, just without Tom Hanks.

Today turned out to be her mark-it-on-the-calendar-girl-you-are-a-woman-now day; she got her period--already!--and though she didn't want her mother, she wanted the dog-eared book she'd been reading over and over for the past year or so. By miraculous fluke of sick day timing, I could do that for her, so I did. By the time I got there, or because I was coming, she was fine. It was good to see that growing girl, so confident in those hallways (I'm almost never at her school), even if she had no use or time for the motherly words I'd come up with on the drive over.

But then we had our moment. She still hugs me, any time, anywhere, though she's too tall to fit under my chin--and I'm tallish myself--and when she did I noticed something.

"What's this?" I asked, fingering the stained neckline of the Supergirl t-shirt we found in the Junior department, now that nothing in the Girls' section fits.

"Huh, what?"

"Did you spill something at lunch?"

"Um, no. . . oh, wait. I know! I ran out of tissues. That's where I blew my nose!"