For you mamas who balance work and home at the same time, I salute you. I recently (this past summer) went back to work, and although I work from home I feel like it is a daily challenge to figure out the elusive work/home life balance. And sometimes it all feels like a whirlwind. A good whirlwind, but some days I feel like it's go-go-go with barely enough time to come up for air. I like busy though, I do. I don't like wearing busy as a badge, but busy in general makes me happy. Hank and I always laugh that even on our honeymoon it was hard for us to just be. We're not the kind of people that can just sit in lounge chairs and soak up the sun...as much as I wish I was like that! I have to constantly remind myself to relax when it's time to relax and carve time out to "take a chill pill" as Henry says. Always, always working on that.
This current whirlwind though- it's made up of a lot. It's part change- my sister's house closed last week so they've been moving out of our home and into their new one. It's part excitement- Henry turning four and Thanksgiving and Christmas and a ton of travel and everything in between. It's part fear of the unknown- my Dad had a major, 6-hour heart surgery yesterday and thankfully he is alright, but of course it's worrisome. And a million other things all swirling around in our little world.
But then there are these moments, these little freeze frames where times stops and goes slowly, or at least it feels like way here in our little cocoon. It's like last night, when Charlie was so cold after his bath and I laid him down to go to sleep just warming up his little body with the soft gray blanket, his big green-brown-hazel eyes round like saucers, looking up at me from his crib. Time slowed. It was just us in that little space of time we'd carved out for ourselves, and I willed myself to memorize every bit of it. Or yesterday, surrounded by a pile of books with Henry, watching the beginnings of him reading, the "c-a-t" becoming cat, the sounds becoming words, and it's just so magical to watch these little building blocks click together in his mind. Click-click-click. These moments are the slow, special ones, and I know to take them in, file them away, keep them for later.
So it's a whirlwind sure, just like anyone's life. We are all busy, we all have our things. But we all have our moments too. We stand in the middle of life going around and around and around and we pause. We take a breath. We take it in. These moments are all unique to who we are, our experiences, our everyday. Crack my head open and I feel like you'd see rows of filing cabinets, lined up by date, creaking and squeaking a little when opened, manilla folders with every color tag lined up, bursting with my moments. They're all in there, amidst so much else going on....little pauses in the middle of life, and for those small bits of time (and for the big ones too), I am so very grateful. I realize now that life won't be slowing down anytime soon, nor do I want it to. But what it reminds me of, is to take pause and reflect, to grab little bits and pieces as life continues to move along in the wonderful, crazy way it does.
xoxo
photo by Lauren Ristow
