Our playground

We took the boys to the playground after the wee one's first haircut on Saturday. As I snapped pictures of the boys romping around, I began to get a strange sense of de ja vu.

When I got home I began rummaging through all our photos, certain I had taken some others at our favorite playground.

Boy was I right. We've been taking the big boy to this playground since before he could walk.

Here I am, mama to only one boy, with that perpetual spit-up catcher draped over my shoulder.



Those cheeks!





Cuz green sweatpants are flattering on any body type.





Whaddya mean don't eat the rocks?

A few months later, I was chasing him around, instead of carrying him around.




Ahh! We never take the sun for granted in New Hampshire.


Slowly, my baby blossomed into a little boy - while I waddled around after him, getting ready to provide him with a brother.



You want to get on? No? Oh thank god cuz I couldn't
lift you anyway - I'm 7 months pregnant.



The following summer he was ruling the roost. Climbing, jumping, swinging and just starting to demonstrate some interest in the other kids, while I wore his growing brother in a sequence of slings.



"My diggah"

Now he does it all with a wee brother toddling around behind him.

Still "my diggah"

It's funny how time passes, so fast and so slow at the same time.  There are hours in the day that seem so long as to be practically interminable. The minutes until naptime - an eternity. Yet, those first visits to our playground seem like only yesterday. How can that bumbling toddler have been replaced by this crazy almost three year old? All the moments in between blurring and blending and softening so that I don't remember quite how many hours he used to scream in the afternoon as a newborn. Nor do I remember how I stood around in the blazing heat nearly every day, hugely pregnant - chasing him, lifting him and pushing him on the swings.

A sequence of completely ordinary, somewhat exhausting days. Yet, when I line up the photos like this - I'm a little staggered. This is his life, and I have the awesome privilege of watching it unfold. Documenting it for him. Bearing witness.  Oh there's that ache in my heart again - he is not mine, he is his own. Stretching and pulling and growing away from me. Remarkable.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

-Kahlil Gibran "On Children"