Tuesday, October 29, 2013

balance

I feel like this photo of Finn does well to illustrate how fast time is now going by - ZOOM. The first few months, heck YEAR of Finn's life certainly took its time, but now that he's 2, and with Lorelei such an easy baby, WOAH...day follows day follows day and sometimes I just want to hit a pause button.
PAUSE, baby girl! PAUSE! I just want to snuggle these little faces, but I also can't wait to see who they become.
There are days (like today) when I go from 8am to 7pm without snuggling them - it's crunch time around here, trying to get everything that can get done done before the snow starts flying (as it's already started to do in areas in Maine). I know it's not going to happen every day or every week. I just need to remember to make the most of the time I DO have with them now, because I'll never have these moments again.
Everything I do, I do for them...but a lot of the time, everything I do takes me away from them for longer than I'd like. It's a tricky balance, but balance it is.

Monday, October 28, 2013

the "g" word

guilt, guilt, guilt.

i guess a lot of parenting is about uncertainty and guilt. will i ever really believe that i'm doing the best job i can? won't i always be second guessing myself?

i feel like the biggest challenge i've had in parenting - in LIFE, really - is living in the moment. my brain is always calling me somewhere else - other (better?) options, other activities...it's something i'd like to avoid passing on to my kids, so i try really, really hard to BE THERE for them. i don't always think i succeed, but at least i try.

and so it's been for the last few weeks that i've been making a concerted effort to live in the moment, trying to put down my camera and experience the day to day, trying to take quiet moments and soak it in. oh, who am i kidding? the only quiet moments are when finn is asleep.

ah, those precious nap times...you know, the ones where they tell you to sleep while they sleep? yeah, i never got the hang of that with finn...it's a good thing, i guess, because these two almost never sleep at the same time. lorelei sleeps until he goes down, then wakes up and is a chortling, gorgeous, smily girl for a couple of hours, until she drifts away, and he wakes up. it's tough sometimes, thinking of all the things i used to get done during finn's nap  time (like making dinner, baking, sewing, knitting, BLOGGING ;) but MAN, it's so nice to get to spend that one-on-one time with her, soaking her up - can you believe she's THREE MONTHS OLD? i swear, at this point with finn, we were just surviving....getting through each day. but with her, the time is literally flying. lorelei is SUCH an easy baby. last night, she didn't wake up to eat until about 4:30, and even then, she just sort of gurgled happily in her crib until i came to get her, as opposed to the straight out screaming finn did multiple times a night at her age.

i try really hard not to call lorelei a "good" baby and finn a "bad" baby - i'm super grateful for each of them just the way they are...and their babyhoods tell me so much about who they'll be when they "grow up". not that i even want to  THINK about them ever, ever growing up. we live in never-neverland, right?

i've already resigned myself to the fact that lorelei is going to be horrified by how much more i wrote about finn when he was wee. it's not that i don't have anything to say about her - i think about possible blog posts all the time, but by the time i have a chance to get it down on the screen, it's gone. my memory (almost wrote "momery" there - fitting, no?) is a total sieve. i hope, though, that she knows how much i love her - that she remembers these moments when i'm trying to be present, to spend time, to get to know her a little bit more every day...and hopefully the number of words will be eclipsed by the moments of attention and time.

or maybe she'll need therapy for her mommy issues and none if it will ever matter. i guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it ;)