My friend says her eleven-year-old daughter is growing up too fast. "She wants to wear make-up and high heels," my friend moans. Her heartfelt questions: Where has time gone? Where is that innocent little baby I brought home from the hospital just yesterday?

You won't hear me asking these same questions. I used to, but not anymore. You see, I'm different now. While other parents are wondering where time went, I, inwardly am crying to my three children, "Grow up! Have birthdays! Get older, please!"

It's not that I want to push my kids out of the nest and watch them soar on their own because I don't love them. Or that I need their bedrooms for guest rooms or a sewing room. No, I never learned to sew. It's simply that growing up is the normal thing to do and I want this for them. And for me.

I changed when my world exploded. It was a winter evening in 1997 at UNC-Hospitals when my four-year-old Daniel died. He'd been through eight months of surgeries, chemo, and radiation for neuroblastoma.

Because of his death, I'm a different parent now. It comes out in many ways. My children have learned to not use certain expressions around me. "He's dead meat" and "It's to die for" are taboo. And they don't joke about being "brain dead." My Daniel was brain dead after a staph infection entered his compromised body and took his life.

I take my children to the cemetery to launch helium balloons with attached paper messages. Oh, I don't make my kids believe the balloons really get it to Heaven, to Daniel. But watching a dozen red, blue, and gold balloons sail into the sky is a spectacular sight and my children enjoy honoring their brother this way. After the balloons are out of view, they dig into sweet slices of watermelon and let me tell how one Fourth of July a twelve-year-old friend brought a watermelon to the hospital for Daniel. He laughed while spitting the seeds at her; she was too timid to spit seeds at a bald-headed kid with a Broviac catheter.

I stress the importance of giving to childhood cancer foundations. I write articles for newspapers and magazines on grieving and memorializing children who have gone too soon. Even though most adults aren't aware, my children know September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, a busy month of advocating for pediatric cancer research.

I'm grateful I can send my kids one weekend in October to a sibling camp in South Carolina, Camp New Horizons, for bereaved siblings. I help them gather mementos of their brother to share with the others at the camp. I thank God they have the friendships of children their ages, who know what it is like to say good-bye to a brother or sister.

And when they just ache that they didn't get to know Daniel better, I dry their eyes -- and mine -- with soft tissues. I use Puffs, because this brand is gentle and life is too short to use generic tissues.

So dear children, grow up. Please. Grow up knowing life is a gift. Some children don't have it for long, so take your gift seriously and make the most of it.

Daniel would.