Heartbeats

I spend a lot of time thinking about how fast time is going, and how my kids are getting so big so fast, and how I wish I could slow things down. But tonight, as I lay in bed between the two of them, I thought a lot about how small they are. How young and little and impressionable. They have so much time in front of them, what will they choose to do? And when I think about the things I don't like (like Archer's tantrums, or Shelly's constant need for me to carry her around), I'm usually in the mind-set that they're old enough to be past those stages. But really, Archer's a little kid, not even four years old yet, that's pretty young. And Shelly's still a baby, an infant, of course she cries, why do I expect anything other than that? I just get so caught up in how old they're getting, that I forget how young they are.

Archer might stomp around telling me he doesn't like me when I tell him its bedtime, and Shelly might act like she needs her space to spread out in the bed, but they both fell asleep crowding me. Shelly with her leg hooked over my arm, and Archer with his feet tucked under my legs and his face snuggled up against me. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart, and I thought about the first time I heard his heart. That fuzzy, staticky sound in the doctor's office when he was only a few weeks along in life, before any other part of him had been formed, that little heart was beating. And that same heart still, in his little body, beating faithfully. Its an amazing thing to be a parent, to know a person before they're even born, to be with that person every day of their life and help them along and then, at some point, gradually release them into the world and watch them take their first steps again and again, first steps into all the new things that they will face as they grow.

So how is it that I keep forgetting how little they are? Its so easy to get caught up in all the new things they're doing and ways that they're growing up. But they're still so small...