Proceed With Caution: Adulthood Approaching

For four years, you speed through what you think is the hardest, most dramatic part of your life, and then before you know it, high school is over. No more worrying about who is going to ask you to prom or how embarrassing your first car is.

Then you spend four (or five or six or twelve) years at college and then it's gone. You're suddenly looking back at all of those finals you stressed over and how terrible boxed wine really is.

And then it happens, before you can blink. You are an adult. I'm not sure when it happens, but I think it's somewhere in between paying your first credit card bill and setting up your retirement plan (barf).

Last night, I attended my first "work" holiday party at one of the other teacher's houses. On a Thursday, aka school night, I brought a dessert and and drank ginger ale. There were three (no, four?) kids crawling around and dropping buffalo chicken dip on the floor. There were no red cups. There was a study to hang your coat. There were no strobe lights. There were h'ordevers. There was no house music being "remixed" by a frat brother. There were women talking about their children getting their licenses. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I've never felt younger.

I think that "we", meaning college kids, think "we" know it all. I'm not sure why I still consider myself a "college kid", because I am not one. I don't think "we" realize how much more we have to look forward to in life. But we do:

We will learn how to coddle a crying baby and what it means to be a parent one day.
We will learn what it means to care for our parents one day.
We will learn what it means to provide for our family instead of our family providing for us.
We will learn how to be a strong adult when we just want to be a kid.

And none of these things come with a manual. Just like being forced into the seemingly foreign idea called "adulthood", we will be forced into new, sometimes scary, situations for the rest of our lives. 

So, proceed steadily, but surely, because adulthood is happening quickly and we're about to learn a whole lot.