Help! My Baby Is All Grown Up

For two years now, my baby has been tucking her shoes into mine at church. (I guess I should explain that I prefer to pray without my shoes on, as I would in any monastery chapel in Egypt.) Her feet have finally grown to the point that her shoes don't fit easily into mine any more, and that is pretty tough on this Coptic mom. My tiny infant has grown into a little lady.

Around the time of her birthday, I got kind of mopey. I would pout at her and say things like "Where's my baby? Where did my little baby go?"

Her responses were really priceless:
"This is the same baby... just big!"
"You know what? You were also small."
"Mama, everyone was two years old. Everyone was one year old. Do you know that?"

The idea that this is the same baby I gave birth to is nearly impossible to digest. And now, months later, I look again, and I barely recognize her.

She recently got a copy of Miss Nelson Is Missing from her aunts. This was a book she used to have read to her at her day care in Virginia, and she has had it read to her a dozen times in the last week. She now has it completely memorized and reads it to herself--word for word. She even sat with one of her aunts and wrote an anti-version called Miss Viola Swamp Is Missing. One day she'll be a pre-teen, and I'll explain that she wrote her first fanfiction before she could even really read!

How do human beings do that? How do they go from completely helpless to creators in their own right? And how can someone watch that process and not believe in a large and all-powerful God?

I love this girl so much it hurts.