“The days are long, but the years are short.” I’m not sure where that quote came from, but it describes my life right now perfectly.
The days are oh so long…and exhausting! I have sixteen hour days of constant motion and by the time I sit down to rest at night, I’m almost too tired to do anything but fall into bed and go to sleep. Every day that I stay awake later than our night owl Sully is an accomplishment.
As long as the days are, 365 of them seem to go by incredibly fast. We’re coming up to Brady’s end of the school year celebration and it seem like yesterday that I was sitting at last year’s celebration. I’m not saying ‘It seem like yesterday’ in a sweet, cliché kind of way; I mean it, it seems like it was actually yesterday, or maybe a month ago at best. Where did the last year go? I was actually present for it, right? I didn’t slip into a coma and miss a few months, did I? The days passed in an endless cycle of going to work, cooking dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, bathing the children, doing the laundry, paying the bills (although it does seem that an unfairly disproportionate number of days were Mondays.) There were a few standouts: Brady lost two teeth, Sully became potty-trained, Colin was born (that’s pretty huge) and has become a little crawler with his first tooth popping through his gums this past week. Mostly, though, the days just passed.
Today was a great day, a long day, but a great day. It was my early day at work so I had time to come home, play on the floor with the baby, do my run, cook an awesome dinner, and take the older boys outside to play, among other things. As I was walking around the block with Brady riding his bike, I willed myself to commit today to memory because I have a feeling that before I know it, Brady will be riding his bike by himself, and Sully will go right behind him, and that little tooth of Colin’s will be falling out. Nothing exceptional happened today, it was just a really nice, long day in a very short year.