makeup
Little girls love to mimic their moms. They see their mom getting ready for the day, and putting on their makeup, and taking great care with every detail, and they learn that this ritual is something very important. Little girls want to be just like their mom, because they love her and they think she is the most beautiful mom in the whole world. These are moments you wish could last forever…the moments before you become a total embarrassment to your child, as most parents do when their kids reach adolescence. For a time…a short time, you are just exactly what they want to be…until you become old fashioned, that is.
Like most girls, Corrie and Amy loved to play dress up, and makeup was a big part of that. I had to really keep an eye on my makeup or I might just find out that it wasn’t lasting quite as long as it really should. Of course, Corrie, being the oldest, was a little better at getting enough makeup on her face than Amy was, until Amy was a little older, that is. My girls always wanted to do the things I was doing, and not just in the area of makeup. I guess it is part of the whole finding yourself process. Before you can find yourself, you have to try out a few different possibilities.
Sure, as mom’s we look back on those moments as maybe a waste of good makeup, or a mess we had to clean up, but in reality it was so much more than an inconvenience…it was a rite of passage, I suppose. Boys are encouraged to have a rite of passage, so why not girls. It is part of becoming a 
woman, but it certainly can be funny as they try to get it just right. And to ask them, it was perfect.
It is just what little girls are all about. It is in their makeup, pun definitely intended. In a desperate attempt to save my makeup, I finally bought the girls some of their own…the kid variety of course. They used the fake stuff, until they realized that it didn’t show up on their faces, and then we had to get something different. They went around with all sorts of different looks. It didn’t really matter, because girls will be girls, and I have seen some very different looks on bigger girls than mine.
As my granddaughter gets older, if find myself thinking back on the years since she arrived. As the mother of daughters, my grandsons were a culture shock for me. Boys are very different from girls. They are rough and tumble, and don’t care about the personal things like girls do. Girls worry about how they look and their clothes, and as in the case of my granddaughter, how her nails look. She used to tell me that my nails were a mess if they were chipped at all. Then she informed me that I needed to fix them. Boys just roll their eyes at those things and head outside to get in the mud. When she was young, we shared girl time together, just her and me. It was a special time for us.
Now that little girl is gone, and she has been replaced with a beautiful and capable young lady. Yes, she still cares about how she looks, although she really doesn’t need to worry about that, because she is stunning. She probably wouldn’t agree, and might not like it that I have singled her out today. Like any other teenaged girl she thinks she has had a bad hair day or bad makeup day, and this, that, or something else isn’t exactly right, but she couldn’t look bad if she tried.
And, she has the ability to be such a beautiful spirit. She is kind and loving, especially to children…a trait she gets from her mom, and children love her…something that she gets from her grandpa. She can be funny or serious, happy or sad, quiet or loud, but to me she is always a beautiful person, inside and out. She lives up to her name, Shai…Hebrew for gift…and that she definitely is…a precious gift, 
that I am so blessed to have…a granddaughter, and the only one I’ll ever have.
Sometimes, as with every teenager, her feelings get hurt, because someone doesn’t see what a wonderful person she is and they step on her feelings, and that makes me sad. I would love to be able to protect her from all the little hurts that life always brings, but I can’t, so all I can do at that point is to let her know that I love her and always will, and anyone who doesn’t see the super special girl that she is, is losing out, because with each passing day, she becomes more and more amazing, and I see more and more how greatly God has blessed me with this precious gift.
