I want to add to/amend my earlier birthday post that I ended talking about how fast time goes, but how that's okay and we're having fun. It is okay--I mean, there's no stopping it, right?--and we are having fun. But there's also something about it that is just the tiniest bit heart-wrenching.
The title of this post captures it exactly, I think. (I'm not sure where I got this saying; I think it's something I picked up from one of my mom's mother-at-home organizations.) I mean, how many times have I watched the clock in that painful hour before dinner with a whining girl hanging from my legs and I'm trying to cook dinner and pick up the house with one hand while holding a baby with the other and the dogs are spinning circles and it's 4:03, then 4:09, 4:17, 4:22, 4:31, 4:33, 4:40, 4:46, 4:57, and YES! FINALLY! 5:00! So that when Kevin comes in at 5:09 I'm shrieking "where have you been?" with a crazed look in my eye? Answer--a lot.
But then I wake up one morning and Nellie is three, the "baby" is one, and I'm putting the Jumparoo in storage (a.k.a. a shelf that Kevin built in the basement), wondering if/when we'll ever be taking it back out, and throwing out the last bottle of baby soap that we received at Nellie's baby showers. (Huh. Three bottles of soap lasted us over three years. This may confirm what my mom has been hinting at not-so-subtly, that I do not bathe my children enough.) Anyway, I'm reminded of the momentum of time, of it's weightiness, how it just keeps passing and there's no going back.
Most days I don't think about such things, I just revel in the new things the girls can do and the new happenings just around the corner, and breathe sighs of relief that we survived another infant stage.
But there are time when my arms ache to hold a newborn baby Nellie or Annie just for a moment, when I wish time would just slow down already.
You can come pick up a box of dress-up clothes from Emily's closet. I think there's even an old maternity top of mine in there. Jackpot.
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