I'm losing her.

On Monday the Princess started kindergarten.

Can you BELIEVE they're making this baby go to kindergarten??

OK.  OK.  Fine.  So maybe that photo is slightly outdated.  Maybe these days she looks more like this:

Superstar!

And this:

And this:

And (SOB!) this:

Look how little she is in front of that big scary building!

She didn't cry.  I didn't cry.  Seriously.  I did not cry.  I know.  I'm a robot.  I might cry now.  But I didn't cry then.

After her first day she told me she loved kindergarten, and I asked her if it was the same as preschool or different and she said it was different "except they have the same rug!" and when I asked good different or bad different she said good different and then she said she didn't need me anymore and she was moving into an apartment with her new friends and she'd see me at Thanksgiving unless she decided to go skiing with her motorcycle-riding, musician boyfriend instead.  OK I might have imagined some of that.  Possibly.

Then we came home and she went outside to play and she caught a butterfly.  She loved her butterfly with everything she has and then she came in and made the following announcement, with great pride:

"Mom.  I trained my butterfly.  Guess what it can do.  I trained it...to play dead.  And it's doing it right now."

And I breathed a little easier, because there's no way her sophisticated new friends are going to put up with dead butterflies littering their apartment, however well-trained they may be, and maybe she still needs me a little bit after all.