Momservation: There is no sweeter reward for years of exhaustive childrearing than to hear a daughter say, “Mom, let’s go shopping!”
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Baby Girl Whitney turns 12 this week. It’s hard to fathom that it’s been a dozen years since I christened her Itty Bitty Whitty Little Girl So Pretty (which though pretty, she was never really itty bitty at 9 lbs 2 ounces and 23 inches long—but Lunker wasn’t very lyrical).
Now my Itty Bitty Whitty stands only 4 inches shorter than me and is gaining fast to make me the shortest person in the family. Just as we realized she could fit in my shoes, she outgrew them. And if I suddenly developed a taste for Abercrombie, American Eagle, and Aeropostale we could wear the same clothes (taste meaning a size 0 waist).
“Preteen” just doesn’t seem like an accurate label for Whitney anymore with her looks, maturity, and above average sarcasm (her poor older brother constantly buzzes right into her witty retorts—a pestering fly into her articulate web). Becoming an official teenager next year will just be a formality. 
Seeing my Baby Girl maturing so rapidly often brings stinging tears to my eyes and choked back sobs of nostalgia for when she truly was just a baby girl. But when I asked Whitney what she wanted for her 12th birthday I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer:
“Let’s go shopping, Mom. I want a day at the mall, just you and me, shopping,” she said.
I sobbed ugly crying face tears of joy.
Forget the precious infant years, the adorable toddler years, the precocious school girl years! THIS is why mothers give birth to daughters! For a shopping companion! For an enthusiastic shopping partner who says, “I can’t live without these shoes! You can never have too many cute jeans! Oh my God, you have to buy that, it looks fantastic on you!”
So Baby Girl and I, in the infamous words of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, are gonna go pop some tags (their song Thrift Shop kills me)! A shopping companion born! And while Baby Girl’s poppin’ tags off clothes from Forever 21 I’ll be popping tags from their jewelry because that’s all that fits me there! But who cares! We’ll laugh about it over a Cilantro Lime Chicken Salad at the Nordstrom Café before heading to try on ridiculously expensive shoes!
Ooooo, I can’t wait until next year when she can wear make-up!