“If the time is supposed to fly by, why do the days drag?”  Bob asked this question repeatedly when the girls were little.

We got so annoyed when everyone would say “Oh!  Take lots of pictures!  The time goes by so fast!”  It seemed our elders tirelessly admonished us for their parenting regrets.

We were already living slower than most of our peers.  Two parents, home full-time with only the farm to break the tedium, nursing, burping, feeding, wiping and playing the games of childhood ad nauseam with no water cooler gossip, no office mates, no night meetings, no dinners out,  no babysitters and no day jobs to punctuate the week.

Yes, we loved our time with our kids.  But let’s face it.  Playing princesses and fairies and making up stories about dragons CAN lose its charm after a few hundred repeats.

When folks lectured us to “cherish this time,” I assured them that our strategy was to immerse ourselves so fully in our parenting experience that we’d be good and ready to put it behind us when the time came.  Kind of like eating so much cake, it makes you sick, so you don’t want to eat any more cake.

And we laugh now, recognizing how much more fun it is to have grown kids compared to little ones.

We enjoy looking at pictures from when the kids were little, but we find ourselves enjoying our days a lot more now.

But this week, my brother and his wife, who are expecting their second this August, decided to slip away for a quick vacation before the new baby comes.

And so their three-year-old, Mila, has come to stay for a week.

And once again, I am reminded of Bob’s observation about how time functions in the world of small children.

The days ARE slow.

But this time, we are blessed with enough wisdom to enjoy the protracted hours.

And just as we did with Saoirse and Ula, we take Mila to the woods for hot chocolate picnics.  We leave sweets for the fairies and go on quests to find dragons.  And I know to push aside the mundane adult fascinations of bookkeeping, correspondence, cocktails and the desk work of life.  This week is about Mila and every delicious moment of what I’ve come to think of as “fairy time,” the magical spell of early childhood; where the hours are long, but the days are numbered.