Celebrate Yourself on Mother’s Day. ‘Cause Being a Mom is HARD.

This post is sponsored by HoneyBaked Ham, but the content is 100% my own.

If you’re a mom, or you HAVE a mom, you know that Mother’s Day is coming up FAST – in 10 days, counting today! A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Easter with our friends at HoneyBaked Ham, and now they’ve asked me to share some thoughts with you on Mother’s Day and motherhood. Which is timely, because I’ve been thinking about something for awhile now – about motherhood, and this gives me the perfect chance to say: Motherhood is hard. It is awesome and wonderful and sweet but it is hard. And this year, on Mother’s Day, I think you should celebrate yourself because you are working through the hard, taking the good with the bad, and doing an awesome job raising your kids.

The picture above is from a vacation in the summer of 2005 when we took Joshua to Hilton Head Island. He was about 17 months old or so, and the sweetest toddler ever. We were a little family of three, and to be honest? We were pretty carefree. I was working part-time still, which I enjoyed, and although life certainly wasn’t perfect, when I look back now, sometimes I long for those early days of motherhood. Joshua was just plain easy, and so, so sweet. Bobby and I had plenty of time for him, and for each other. Joshua was developmentally right on track or ahead in every area. He was hardly ever sick, he slept well, and he was so loving.

A couple years later, when I was rocking Sophie to sleep for the billionth time after the trillionth middle-of-the-night nursing session, I’d physically long for the days when Joshua was a baby, because it was truly easy. And not until I had my second child, my sweet, spunky, crazy-from-birth girl, did I realize how hard motherhood and parenting can be.

I have had a lot of hard with Sophie and with Jonah. That is just the way it has worked out. I look at that picture above and I see a naive mom (but a very happy one). Since that time I have had many, many moments of motherhood when I have thought, “If someone had told me before I had kids that it would be this hard, I don’t know that I would have had them.”

But even though I honestly have felt that, it only takes one look into the sweet faces of my three babies for me to know without a shadow of a doubt that not having those kids would have been the most foolish decision of my life.

My motherhood journey has not exactly been carefree, save for the first 2 3/4 years of it. But it has been truly wonderful. The joyous moments far outweigh the hard ones, and are sometimes made more sweet because of the hard ones. There are beautiful, happy, ecstatic moments of motherhood I never would have had if I hadn’t had the hard moments first.

And since my motherhood journey is far from over, I know there will be many more highs and lows to come. I can’t know what they will be, but I do know that they will be worth it, that anything is worth it, if I get to be Joshua, Sophie, and Jonah’s mom.

So tell me, my people – my friends at HoneyBaked Ham and I would like to know – what was the most carefree time or moment in your motherhood journey? What do you most look forward to, and what do you wish you could rewind and do again because it was so wonderful? And what moments have been made all the more sweet because of the hard ones that came before them?