Spring fever struck our house, all in one week.

It started with a pair of worms on the sidewalk. I’m not going to say what the worms were doing. Frankly, I didn’t realize that worms were capable of or into that sort of thing.

Suffice it to say, when Lucy and Alice asked what was happening, I said, “Uh, that’s something we’re not going to talk about on the way to school.”

The girls thought the whole situation was hilarious.

“We’re not going to giggle about it, either,” I said. “Let’s talk about math, instead.”

“One plus one equals TWO!” Lucy said. “TWO WORMS!”

Alice shrieked with laughter.

That day, when I picked the kids up at school, Lucy disclosed that she’d received a note in her desk. “It said I LIKE YOU,” she said. “YOU’RE PRETTY.”

“Pretty?” I asked Lucy. “Pretty what? Pretty messy?”

Alice did not appreciate my attempt to kid around.

“Mama,” she said. “Be serious. The note was a compliment about the content of Lucy’s character.”

As I was telling this story to a friend of mine, she said, “I bet you felt like a huge jerk.”

Sort of. Most of the time, Alice is the biggest grownup in our house. Of course she would paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. in an attempt to stick up for Lucy.

But what can I say…it seems like there should be more time between diapers and training bras. You close your eyes and open them again, only to see your daughters racing toward adulthood at top speed.

This part, I mean literally. After school that day, we stopped off at the park to enjoy some of the early-spring sunshine. A few boys from Lucy’s class were there, and Lucy immediately started chasing them.

Alice didn’t want to be left out, so she started chasing the boys, too. Only she was a little smarter. As the other kids ran around the perimeter of the playground, she cut diagonally across, which brought one boy in particular nearly in grabbing range.

Have you ever really watched little girls chase little boys on the playground? It makes you wonder how they can possibly manage to move so slowly on the way out of the house in the morning.

Little girls in pursuit of little boys are like greased pigs. The little boys are faster, but only just so—it’s as though they want to get caught. Every so often, they turn their heads, slow their strides, let the girls get close, and BOOM! They’re off again, just out of reach.

At one point, I did lose sight of Lucy in her wild pursuit of the boys. I scanned the playground until I heard her voice. But it seemed to be coming from a strange place. I followed the sound and spied her face through the sweeping branches of a pine tree. She was about fifteen feet off the ground, surrounded by a group of boys.

I remember this feeling when I was a kid, even though I was too repressed to actually chase boys. I preferred to play soccer with them and pretend I wasn’t at all interested when it might as well have been my heart being kicked around on the field.

That yearning we all have for love and the palpable, hairy fear that we’ll be rejected or worse, invisible, starts so young.

And just when you think your life is settled enough that your heart is secure, the seed starts to sprout in your children, spreading its shining leaves everywhere you look.

For now, I’m glad the kids run fast enough—and slow enough—to avoid the messy capture. Someday, though, there are going to be some very lucky boys out there. I hope they realize it.