Time Keeps on Slipping into the Future

I’m feeling uninspired. I want to write but cannot think of what words to say. I have a half dozen blog posts started but I can’t seem to finish them. Nothing seems to come out quite the way I want it.

I want to make cards or notebooks or something – anything – for my etsy shop and I sit and stare at the blank cards unable to figure out what to do with them.

The stress of M’s surgery is mostly over. Now begins the attempts to keep the girl resting who essentially feels better save for a sore throat. The challenge continues to keep the brother who is always full of vim and vigor from riling his sisters. The challenge continues to remain vigilant in keeping the baby safe from the multitude of things that I never had to worry about when the older two kids were babies.

The hours, even one fewer thanks to daylight savings, careen through the day faster and faster. I swear I was just pregnant yesterday, yet here I have a 9-½-month-old girl who seems intent upon walking before her first birthday. She’s climbing stairs and letting go of hands willy-nilly, showing me that I am soon to be out of a job as her “everything” as she will be more and more independent.

Then there is this boy who was just a toddler days ago who has morphed not only into a preschooler, but also into a pre-kindergartener. He has ideas and stories and personality in unlimited supply. How will I manage in a few short months to drop off two of my children to strangers for most of the day? I hope that he never loses that enthusiasm for life. I want to always hear strangers say he’s quite a character isn’t he? I want to always nod my head in slightly exasperated agreement.

Just yesterday my oldest baby showed me again that she is growing into a big girl by leaps and bounds. We were trying to do some homework so that she doesn’t fall behind in her schoolwork. She chose to start with math…something that I have never been very fond of but for which she seems to have a natural ability. We were working with coins and writing money values in two ways, as cents and as dollars and cents. It didn’t take much coaching before I realized I did not need to do much. She was adding up 2 quarters, 1 dime, 3 nickels and 4 pennies to equal 79 cents in no time. I’m certain I couldn’t have done the same at her age.

So here I sit feeling, in a way, that life is rolling on around me. Everyone is growing and learning and doing, it seems, except for me. I am a bystander, yet I feel like I am missing so much even as I watch it happening.

I want to write, to take photos, to scrapbook, to capture these days before they slip away forever, but I am stuck. I get lost in the hugs and the holding. I gather them into my arms and inhale their hair. They fill my senses and deplete my energy. They make me want to be better at everything.

So I try. I try to write. I try to create. I try to be patient and loving and kind. But it is hard to do it all. So now I mostly am being mom and the blog is getting sloppy seconds. So be it.