day 82: running the hall

                               I'm naming this picture.  It's called "Echoes of Motherhood"

Sometimes I get overwhelmed with my two screaming, squealing, free spirited, hard-to-get-out-of-the-house, messy, needy, beautiful kids. 

The thing is, this mothering?  It is hard.  It stretches me, it calls on everything I have and much more than I have to give.  It is making me into something so much deeper, richer, and lovely than I was. 

And that stretching?  It hurts.  None of us like to be pushed outside our limits, but in the end, aren't we so grateful that we did?

I glanced at my Lego/toy/book laden floor this morning and started feeling overwhelmed.  Then I looked at my energetic kids sprinting down the hallway using their pushing toys as bumper cars. I saw my bag of smelly diapers hanging on the door knob ready to be taken out.  I saw random shoes without matches scattered all over the floor (compliments of my shoe-loving 1-year-old), and suddenly my eyes started getting wet.  I realized that sooner than it seems, these times will be a distant memory.  The constant pounding of little feet on my floors will only play when I close my eyes and try with all my might to remember. 

Sometimes it seems as though I will never have my children in school.  I will never be able to go to the bathroom by myself again.  But this picture?  It reminds me that my everyday will soon change.  That soon, my memory of these "hard, in-the-trenches days" will be much like this picture, faded and beautiful.