One by one, I uncovered the photos as I worked my way through the recesses of my cellphone.

There was the time we took our then tiny daughter and her one-time teenage babysitter to dinner and the waiter found giant chef’s hats for each of them.

There they were making funny faces at a hockey game, wearing funny glasses in the dollar section of Target, showing me how incredibly bored they were, posing with the Easter Bunny, snuggling in the backseat of the car.

There was that time the two of them managed to fit together inside a giant sweatshirt, two heads poking through the neck hole, two sets of hands poking through the sleeves, and there was the time I captured the two of them head banging in the backseat of the car as Metallica blared on the stereo.

I clicked on each of them, one at a time, and tapped the button to send them flying through the air to the phone of that babysitter, no longer a teenager but a grown woman sitting in the seat beside me.

We’d come together for our last-ever family weekend, a chance to spend time with the no-longer-tiny, now fully grown college senior who was sitting just a few seats away from us now.

It was the kind of weekend that comes with an itinerary and a quiet tally running in the back of your head. Last time lining up to hear the homecoming speaker. Last time buying a sweatshirt in the campus store.

I wasn’t keeping count at the hockey game. I was too busy watching the photos land, one buzz at a time, on the phone beside me.

Then, somewhere in the second period, the arena sound system kicked into Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

The babysitter nudged me. “Well, I guess that’s it for the braids.”

I didn’t have to look to know what I’d see, but I did anyway.

Two seats to my right, the college senior’s blonde hair was flying, exactly the way it had in the backseat of my car a dozen years before.