Sappy

It's 1 AM and I should be sleeping; I sure wish I felt compelled to write at more convenient times! But I'm having one of those mom moments where you are filled with so much emotion that you feel like you are going to burst. So if you don't like cheesy posts about emotions, keep on moving, this post is not for you. And just a disclaimer, towards the end I sound like a hormonal pregnant lady, which I am NOT. Just normal crazy me.

Every night before I go to bed I sneak in the kids rooms and watch them as they sleep. I watch as their little chests rise and fall with each breath, and the way their eyelashes flutter lightly on their cheeks, and laugh at how they have their butts up in the air or the way they are posed like they should be on a lounge chair by a pool rather than asleep in their beds. Watching them rejuvenates me after a long day of their crying, or whining, or just being. However, lately after checking on them I find myself sad. Sad, because every day they change and get older. So then I start plotting up ways to stop time, which so far seems impossible. I'm the kind of person that's always anxious to move onto the next stage or the next thing, not because I like change, but simply because I worry about what that next stage is. Or sometimes because I think the situation I'm currently in can be improved. But now, with these kids, I don't want to move onto the next thing. I want Alexis to remain almost 4 for the rest of...forever, and for Tyler to be almost 2 for just as long. It's like I've finally been able to see what a great thing I've got here and I don't want it to be any different than it is right now.

In a little over a year Alexis is going to start kindergarten. She's going to enter a world where she thinks her friends and teachers are smarter than me, where Tyler is no longer her favorite playmate, where she stops hopping when she gets excited because other kids will laugh at her, and where she starts to feel annoying emotions like self-consciousness and embarrassment. A place where my voice is no longer the only one she hears. And when she's gone at school I hope that I remember the moments like today where the two of us curled up on the couch and looked at every single page of her princess look and find book, or how at dinner I convinced her that broccoli made her arms grow so she picked all the broccoli out of her pasta, quickly ate it and then asked for more.

Tyler has been sick since yesterday evening and tonight just as I was about to fall asleep he started crying, so I brought him into our bed and got him a cup of milk to drink. Then I laid there with him as he dozed in between sips, and stroked his hair and his little fat dimpled hand. And I tried to memorize the way he fingered the trim of his blanket that he loves so much, and the sounds he made and the way he holds his sippy cup so that the tip is barely in his mouth. And for once I didn't wish that he would hurry up and drink so that I could go to sleep, I didn't grumble about him keeping me up. Instead I said a silent prayer of thanks that I could lay there with him just a little more, that I could hold him just a little longer, that I could be his mom. And just when I was about to cry because I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, he reached his little arm up, put it around my neck and pulled my cheek next to his...just for a second. Then the tears came. And with them the realization that this constant state of tiredness that I seem to be in may or may not someday change, but my kids are ever changing, and since I'm helpless to stop it, I don't want to miss one second of it.