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Sitting with Sophie

wistfully Sophie

Sophie sits on my lap watching her favorite show, Word World, and I bury my face in her soft, sweet-smelling hair. She absentmindedly reaches back and grabs a thick lock of my hair and grips it tightly. She doesn’t let go.

I drag my fingertips lightly across her little baby belly, back and forth, back and forth. She doesn’t respond, just grips my hair and chants along with the characters on Word World. But when I stop tickling her tummy, she lets go of my hair to grab my hand and puts it back on her belly – still not taking her eyes off the TV.

I giggle and kiss her soft cheek as I tickle her again. She smooshes her face closer to mine, I breathe in that sweet clean-smell hair again, give her butterfly kisses on those angelic cheeks, and think to myself, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

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Enjoying Today.

I moan and complain a lot about how my kids are growing up too fast, how I want Sammy to just stay a baby (he’s still a baby, right? Even though he’s 1 now??), and how in general time passes too damn quickly. (Except when I was bitching about wanting my pregnancy to be over. The grass is always greener, no?)

But one comment I got on this post (“Does anyone know how to freeze time?”) has really stuck with me, and though I didn’t really get it at the time, I am starting to see it now.

Karen at Pediascribe told me this:
In some respects freezing time would be great. I miss my kids as babies. But in other respects, I’m glad time marches on and they grow older and wiser and morph into little people. We’re just back from vacation and we had the best time with our 11 and 13 yr old kids. It was a totally different trip than when we went when they were 3 and 5. In a different way. In a totally fun way. In a way that could not have happened had I frozen time.

I am really starting to see this with Kate. We do such fun things together now, stuff that Andy and I enjoy as much as she does, and not just in the “Oh this is so fun because I love seeing her have so much fun” kind of way. Karen’s words came back to me the last time we were at Chuck E. Cheese. Kate and I played a fierce game of air hockey (one of my personal faves), and even though she thought she was scoring when the puck went into the goal on her side, we had a blast. We watch tv shows and movies we both enjoy now (she has inherited my love for “Full House,” which makes me ridiculously happy, and seriously she, Andy and I all really liked the new Hannah Montana movie!), we play fun games like Uno, and we read real books together. Just last night I was trying to figure out how old she has to be before I start buying her Sweet Valley Twins books… I can hardly wait. (If only I hadn’t sold my complete collection at a garage sale…).

And while I still look wistfully at the pictures of her as a tiny baby, wishing I had clearer memories of those sleep-deprived, hormonally-imbalanced days, I am so proud of the individual she is becoming, and I look so forward to all the ages and stages she’ll go through in the future.

Except the part when she’s a teenager and hates me. Then I’ll be looking for a way to fast forward time, rather than freeze it.

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The Blogosphere Grieves Today

The blogging community is a real, supportive community, and today we are grieving for Heather, who lost her sweet girl Maddie, 17 months, last night. I don’t know Heather really well, but I was stuck in an elevator with her for 45 minutes at BlissDom. She was the one who felt a little better about her panic because I was panicking more (always happy to help). And her blog is funny, and I love following her on Twitter.

But what else do I need to know? She’s a mother. I know what that feels like, as do most of you. And I can’t imagine what she’s feeling now. My friend Rachel wrote a beautiful post that I think expresses how we’re all feeling today, with a beautiful picture of Maddie, here.

Maddie was a preemie, and so Heather has been committed raising money for the March of Dimes. If you have a couple of extra bucks today, all the mommy bloggers in the world would be thrilled if you’d donate in Maddie’s name. There is a link to do so in sidebar of Heather’s blog.

****whoops, Heather’s blog is overloaded with traffic from caring readers. Here is a direct link to Maddie’s March of Dimes page where you can donate.*****
Now go hug your kids. Life is short. Let’s all take some extra time to just play today.

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