Life is short, but oh so sweet!

Today was Senior Day at church. I don't know if every church does this, but it's kind of a day where the elders of the church take over the service. They plan the service, the songs, invite a speaker, do the children's sermon, etc. The whole church service is run by a group of Seniors.

Ours sang funny songs for their specials, about their hair being white and their eyesight going bad, that got some laughs and livened us up. They also sang about being ready to go Home and meet the Saviour. It got me thinking about Jacob, and how short life is already! (Imagine, one day his children are going to think about the 80's the way I think about the 30's!)

Everyone tells you before you have kids that life will seem to fly even faster, and they are totally right. It seems as if every time I have started to get tired of the "stage" he's in (sleep deprivation and constant nursing, then not being able to put him down all day, now the separation anxiety) he has flown right through it into something else, making me want to scream "STOP! Stop growing so darn fast!" This weekend, I had to lower his crib after going in to his room for the second time to find him standing and holding on to the waist-high crib rail. So now, I can no longer lean down into his crib and kiss his sweet little head goodnight. A moment that I have taken for granted the last six months is now gone.

I also tried to spend a few extra minutes with him by rocking him after nursing him tonight, which turned into a meltdown. My sweet little baby that cries when I go around a corner of the room is too big to be rocked when he's tired. He wants the routine of being placed gently in his crib drowsy so that he can take his Mickey blanket, flip onto his tummy, turtle his butt up, and put himself to sleep. .::sigh::. It's a good problem to have, but maybe we did too good of a job teaching him to self-soothe, because now I look back over the last 8 months and a week and wonder if it would even take two hands to count the number of times I rocked my son to sleep?

Life is just flying past at warp speed. Two and a half months ago, my guy was tripod-sitting for a few seconds before tumbling over...now he's pulling up and trying to test himself by letting go of me when he's standing up. He's babbling "da-da", "ba-ba", and "ma-ma" almost constantly, and I'm starting to believe he even knows which one I am. Where did my little baby go? And will I cry every time he reaches one of these huge milestones the way I am as I'm typing this? Every stage is so beautiful and so fleeting that I have to just remind myself to cherish it, to find ways to fit more in and yet stop to enjoy my son's life.

I vow to never again utter the words "it's been a long day", because now that little man is half way between half a year and his first birthday, I know that our days are far too short.