Blogiversary and the kids

4 years ago...it began.

I'm not posting on my actual blogiversary, but given the relative silliness of the event I'm sure that you all won't mind me being a few days late. I'm sure you're just happy to see anything here at all, given how quiet I've been.

I've enjoyed blogging and I plan to keep going. I'm sure my focus will continue to shift as it has over the last four years, but I'm also pretty positive that knitting, Heather and Todd will stay the most often discussed topics for the foreseeable future.

Given all of the things I'd like to cover today, I'm actually going to break my thoughts up into a few posts, instead of forcing you to deal with a big jumble like I usually do. :-)

I suppose that most of all, reaching my blogiversary is a reminder of all that has happened in the last four years. When I started this in July 2005, I knew that we wanted to have kids, but it still felt like that would be far in the future. Even though I knew we planned to start trying in less than a year it seemed like such a big deal that I wasn't even really letting my mind focus on it yet. Serious denial. Despite knowing I wanted to be a mom, it was still a big step to be willing to give up our comfortable DINK lifestyle and the ability to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I remember one night that R and I were eating some sort of random dinner on the couch because back then I only cooked a real meal sporadically, and I realized that once we had kids I was going to have to cook every night. And the thought just made me feel suffocated.

I'm not telling you this to make you think that I have any regrets about becoming a mom, because I don't. I guess I'm just trying to express that even though I'm not always a big fan of making dinner every night or having to do chores every evening, it's a worthwhile trade-off for my two adorable, charming and lovely children. And I suppose I think this is worth saying because back in 2005 I wasn't sure if I would feel that way. What I mean, is that back then I was much more looking forward to parenting older kids (say 5 or 6 years old) who could fully communicate and be somewhat independent. I didn't know that I was going to enjoy the young stages quite so much (other than the sleep deprivation, of course) or that a 2 1/2 year old could communicate so fluently.

I say this in part because I know that the transition back to work in two weeks isn't going to be easy (let's not even talk about how early I'm going to have to get up!). But I know that with time we'll find our groove and that everything with kids is a constant state of flux - when one thing gets easy something else takes its place and gets hard. So just when we get our routine figured out Todd will start crawling and mess it all up again. ;-)

But the jist of this long stream of consciousness is that in the end I know it is all worth it. The challenges make the fun times that much sweeter.