The title of this posting is a little melodramatic, I admit. But as I was contemplating what I was going to write about this evening, it occurred to me that today was my last full day with Sophie before returning to work full-time on Monday. Wow.

My eight months of vacation from work are over. My eight months as a stay-at-home mom have come to an end. It’s truly been a momentous year. How lucky I’ve been

I will go to work on Monday happy in the knowledge that my two girls are healthy, smiling (usually) and thriving. I took the above photo of Sophie the other night, just before bed. She was dancing in circles in Chloe’s bedroom. She’s holding her sacred towels and Shirley in her hands. Her curls were bouncing in time to the music. She was singing the song in her little toddler voice. She was simply adorable.

You might be wondering how we spent our last day together. Anticlimactically is how, since I wasn’t at all thinking about the fact that THIS WAS IT.

She screamed and cried when I, and not my husband, went to retrieve her from her crib this morning. She watched her usual TV shows, including an episode of “Blue’s Clues” about dinosaurs that she’s seen so many times she can now recite some of the dialogue. We read lots of books cuddling in Chloe’s bed, she had some lunch and fought against taking a nap, and we went for a brief walk around the neighborhood and sang “Alouette,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Litte Star” and “Now I Know My ABCs” as we strolled down the sidewalk. She pranced around the dinner table munching on Indian bread and then cheerfully went upstairs to bed with her Papa.

I doubt I will have another chance to enjoy so much free time with my family before I hit retirement age (which is still far away, but perhaps not as far away as I would like). Or perhaps more terrifying, before I’m a grandmother. Perish the thought.