As I sit down on the couch to fold a load of my children’s clothes, still fresh and warm from the dryer I start to think of all the things I am going to miss.
Lola’s owl pajamas trimmed in sea foam green, the long-sleeve onesie that says “I love Daddy” across the front, Lucas’s Star Wars and superhero T-shirts, socks embedded with sand, and a pair of camouflage pants with a stain on the knee that no matter how hard I try, can’t seem to remove.
These little clothes.
They are outgrowing them faster than I’d like.
Faster than I imagined.
There’s other things too; morning “Mommy snuggles”, as Lucas calls them, him telling me I’m beautiful, coming up behind me and hugging my legs, asking for one more book or to “play with me”, his sneaky screen time shenanigans/negotiations, willingly wearing whatever I lay out for him each day and the questions. So many questions! Someday he’ll know more than me and have way more credible sources.
Lola is on her way to walking and with that will come a freedom she’s never known. It’s an exciting and witnessing a baby experience things for the first time is pure magic. Right now it is a daily occurrence and so hard to believe we are nine months into a year of her firsts.
It goes by fast. I’ve heard it from day one of becoming a mother and it’s true. Cliché, but the truest statement about parenthood.
One day you’re rocking your newborn to sleep in a freshly painted nursery with new sheets on a crib surrounded by stuffed animals and diapers and other baby paraphernalia you never even knew existed trying to remember the words to “Hush, Little Baby” and the next, you’re sending them off to kindergarten with a backpack twice their size, reviewing sight words, hosting sleepovers, building with Legos and worried that soon you won’t be able to pick them up any longer.
I love being a mother. I especially love being a mother to Lucas and Lola. Each day is eerily similar but also very different from the last.
I adore these children, these little humans full of life and love and growing and changing right before my eyes. There are more things than I cannot count about these precious days and these precious people I will miss.