Bittersweet graduation weekend

This weekend I watched my two younger siblings graduate. They attended different schools so there was a graduation on each weekend day. It felt wrong somehow, to watch them be treated like grown adults. In my mind they're little kids still. 

I mean, I watched them grow up. My mother wasn't much of a caretaker for us and we had a large family so I was often the person who had to step in for child watching. I fed them, changed their diapers, helped them pick clothes for school, and so much more. In a way it feels like my own kids graduated. I very nearly wept at the thought that Id be doing my little sisters makeup for the last time. They both look so grown up and yet, in my heart, they're still so young. 

Ill miss them when they grow up more. My family isn't known for being super close together so Im aware that spending time with them will become increasingly rare. They'll go to college and make more friends and I'll sit aside and let them. I have to: they're independent people with lives. But for a moment I wish they were just my awnry little kids again. I wish they were two awkward children playing in the yard outside and bugging me about whatever game I'm playing on the family computer. Life felt so simple then.

Begging won't get that time back and at the end of the day they were never really my kids. Its selfish to expect them to be my little boy and girl forever. However, part of me will always look at them and see a set of 8 year olds looking back. 

I wonder if anyone else feels the same right now. Or maybe there's new graduates who have perspective the other way around.