Where does the time go?

We disassembled the crib this weekend and put bunkbeds up in the girls' room. "What should we do with it?" asked my husband, because for the first time in nearly a decade there were no tiny Sabourins waiting in the wings, or more accurately my bulging belly, to save it for. This, is my baby - my nearly three-year-old, ultra-perceptive, talk your ear off, jokester of a daughter growing more independent by the second. They told me it would all pass by in a heartbeat, those mothers, aunts, and grandmas with grown children of their own, but I ignored them, probably because my up all night newborn was unusually fussy or our potty training toddler was peeing on the kitchen floor and I couldn't, right then, make sense of anything. But now the days that once felt like forty-two hours long seem to have been shaved to a scant fifteen minutes - now I understand, precisely, why seizing each moment is imperative.