“Children start walking at their own pace, too,” she muses, eyes still aimed high. “It doesn’t matter if it’s at eight months or eighteen months, even though people like to tell you that something is wrong. They’ll say your child is falling behind if the process doesn’t line up with their own ideal timeline.” She tilts her head to the side, a silver earring glinting in a sunbeam. “Then, suddenly, those babies are all grown up, running and chasing and thriving, and you realize you hardly remember them ever crawling. All you see is how far they’ve come.”
