the pumpkin patch + thoughts on babyhood

10/12/2015
this is likely not the first post you've seen about picking pumpkins, and likely won't be the last one either. in my defense, there truly is some magical element involved when you put little kids into an autumn scene filled with pumpkins and hay bales! i'm the crazy mom with a stupid smile pasted to her face, chasing her kids around with a camera all night long. because really there just aren't many things that compare with the kind of satisfaction i get while watching my kids experience blissful carefree happiness.



 fun facts:

jace is wearing one of dan's beanies and beck is wearing one of mine. big headed kids are how we do!

jace looks like he is fourteen years old these days.

jace found that tiny little pumpkin gourd and was soooo excited ("this one is so cute and little just like beck!") so he ran and handed it to little brother, who promptly threw it into the wheelbarrow. (jace also picked out a little white gourd for rockie, which was cute.)

dan picked out an amazingly authentic big warty orange and green pumpkin which is now on the front porch and all of the neighbor kids continue to remind us: "uhhhhh that's really ugly."

i took approximately one hundred pictures trying to get both of my boys on that hay bale and in not one of those pictures were they looking at the camera.

and then just for funsies, here is a side-by-side of Beck exactly one year ago and today: 



i know, right?! they grow so fast! can i go off on a tangent for a moment? ever since i looked at this picture of my baby b one year ago, my mind has been reeling with thoughts. and what is a blog for if not for getting my thoughts out?

i have loved watching this kid growing and changing. there's no question about it now, he isn't a baby anymore! he's all toddler. his personality is coming out in full force and it's so fun to watch beck becoming beck. i was so intent on soaking up that first year because i knew i would blink and he wouldn't be a baby anymore. i wanted to soak up baby everything as much as i possibly could because he is my last baby! and i had this worry that i might really miss babies. but now he's this sweet chunky funny happy personality-packed toddler who is becoming more and more independent by the minute, and i find that i'm quite satisfied.

i find that i'm very content with how well i soaked up babyhood while i had it in my life. i made it through two pregnancies! i survived morning sickness and stretch marks and engorged boobs! you DO NOT KNOW PAIN until you've experienced engorged boobs. i survived pushing big-headed large pounded babies out of my you-know-what, TWICE. that's two times more than anyone should have to go through ever, thankyouverymuch. i recovered from the broken tailbone and all of the stitches and scars after giving birth! i experienced breast feeding and bottle feeding both! i made it through months and months of not sleeping more than three hours at a time! we got past all of my crazy hormones and all of that crying and crying for no reason at all!

babyhood is so beautiful. if ever there was a need to swear, it would be to really emphasize that being a mother with an infant is so damn beautiful. it's the kind of beautiful that is so much that way because it's so damn hard. babyhood is only the most contradicting thing i have ever experienced in my entire life. because you're so full of love and happiness and so overwhelmed with joy, while also going through the hardest most overwhelming most exhausting times of your entire life, all at the very same time. It's this roller coaster of happy and hard. It's work, so much work, having a baby.

but never once did i think it wasn't worth it. babyhood with both of my boys was the most worth-it of anything i've ever experienced in my life. and now i find myself in a place where i don't have a baby anymore, where i blinked and he turned into a growing toddler, and i'm just so very happy with the babyhood that we had. i soaked it up just right, i think, just enough that i can feel happy with it while also feel happy to be done with it all at the same time.

babyhood was a fun time of life, and now i have a boy and a toddler and i find that we are living in this transitional stage of life because of it. we still have the baby overflow that a toddler brings, like upcoming potty training and big boy bed transitions, and i'll go ahead and make sure that i don't take any of it for granted because this is it. this is it.

james taylor once said the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time, and that has stuck with me hard because, TRUTH. i often find myself really trying so hard to enjoy all of this change and craziness and watching these boys turning into boys before my very eyes. good grief i love them.

but all of that from a post about the pumpkin patch! pheww.



happy monday friends!


xoxo

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