I love-hate May

I have a love-hate relationship with May. It is the month in which both my kids were born, which means two things: I feel a love and excitement to celebrate how amazing they are on their birthdays, and simultaneously I get a sick feeling in my stomach that they are growing up so incredibly fast. My gut feeling is that I want them to stop growing, stop abandoning more of the sweet morsels of childhood every year. Every May I tease them about my decision to stop feeding them so they'll stay whatever age they are threatening to leave behind. The whole month is very bittersweet for me.

I was cleaning out some of my daughter's school work yesterday. She has a pile of folders and art projects on the floor next to my desk, containing work from the last three months that her teacher recently sent home. She likes to doodle and has always been pretty artistic. I imagine in later years, her scrawling on her folders and notebooks will be about boys and song lyrics and her BFFs. But right now she is only seven and I am eating up every last bit of her littleness, since it seems to be slipping away quickly. In the pile, I found this folder, one with which she started the school year.


If you can't read what it says toward the bottom in the blue colored shape, it says:

My famoly is asam!

(Joyful *sigh*) She doodles about us, about me. She loves our family and thanks God for it often. That makes my heart sing. It is more than I could ask for. However, I will never see this sentence again, on another folder or otherwise. She knows how to spell these words correctly now. Her sentiment may turn up in or on another project. But this particular sentence is a sweet morsel, the words having been already left behind, and one that makes me smile and cry all at once.

A few days ago, my daughter appropriately used the phrase, "absolutely incredible." And to her I say "Quit it!" Quit getting bigger and heavier and smarter and older and less like the child I knew last year.

Time is so unrelenting. I'll make it through to June, just expect me to be back with a similar post same time next year.