Uh-oh, Dirt; How Did That Get There?

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.—Phyllis Diller

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]All too quickly, our week of baby pictures comes to an end. I could easily go another week or more, but I’ll save those for another time. We need to move on here, just as babies move on with their little lives, growing up right in front of our eyes. Growing up happens much too quickly from a parent’s perspective, and too slowly from the child’s. Growing up is why we take pictures, so we have a record, so we can look back and prove that we really were tiny, cute, and cuddly. While our personalities develop in ways that may make us grumpy and prickly, pictures show us that we were once small, and probably even lovable.

None of us actually remembers growing up. If your parents took a lot of pictures and tell a lot of stories, it can feel like you remember that period of your life, but fortunately, we forget the sensation of sitting in a wet, poopy diaper and being force-fed strained peas. We forget the frustration of being immobile, or the fear of thinking that anything, or anyone, not directly in our line of sight was gone forever. Be thankful we don’t remember trying to put everything we touch into our mouths, or that diaper rash that your mom could never quite get to go away.  Growing up definitely has its advantages.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]When it comes to our own children, though, growing up is something that happens much too quickly. We put  them to bed at night, and wake up the next morning to find they’ve grown two sizes. They go from nursing to demanding pizza in a heart beat. When someone says one of my sons’ names, my first thought is still of them being little and riding on my shoulders. Now, they’re all well over six feet tall and could more easily carry me than I them. Birthdays whiz by at alarming speed and our babies go from playing with cars to driving them.

Watching your kids growing up is challenging not merely because we lose the baby and trade them in for adults, but because all the while they’re growing up, we’re growing old. There’s no escaping either condition, no matter how much skin cream one uses or in how good of shape one stays. By the time our children are grown enough to be out of the house, we’re old enough to be ready to sell it and move to an apartment near a beach. Life is rather cruel that way, isn’t it?

Growing up is inevitable. Growing up happy is a gift. Having pictures to remember it all is a treasure. [/one_half_last]