But getting to the first one took so long that I bargained with the powers that be for just one.

As soon as Emery was born I knew I wanted another.  Lucky for me, the bargain for one fell through as I became pregnant again.

And when I was pregnant with Eve, I once again imagined 4 children, my house filled with the sounds of  squeals, laughter and bare feet slapping the tile as they played.

But something happened when Eve was born.  Something as in a feeling I’d never felt before: a feeling of enough.

And I know that I am finished wanting children.  It’s difficult to grasp such a concept when wanting children was the bane of my existence not so long ago, but nevertheless, it’s where I am.

My heart is so full.  I’ve got sisters to raise and daughters to hold and I honestly don’t want for anything else. 

Well, except for a new blog.  With pretty fonts and bright colors.  A new place to celebrate Emery and Eve as I weave through this path of motherhood.  A place that doesn’t include the documentation of all my old doubts and desperation.  A place that better reflects the woman I have become: content, delighted, full.

I hope you will come along for the ride:   http://fullarmsfullheart.com/

My, my how you have grown,  and I right along with you.  It’s amazing how fleeting two years can be, and even more so how you have bloomed from a tiny newborn into an articulate, beautiful, spunky little girl.  I’ve learned a lifetime of lessons in these two years, though I’m forever a work in progress.  In celebration of your birthday, I’d like to share some of my gleaned perspective with you because someday, when the time is right, you may choose to have a child of your own, and there are a few things you should know but I shall surely forget lest I write them down:

Most likely, when you are expecting your first child people will congratulate you.  Then, they’ll predict that you won’t sleep or eat or have a life that remotely resembles what it was before you had a child.  Ironically, when you finally have your baby you’ll wonder why no one gave you insight to how emotionally challenging parenting can be and how it stretches so far beyond skipping meals and interrupted sleep.  You’ll find yourself occasionally second guessing carefully made parenting choices, finding your best resource in other mothers and crossing your fingers that you’re actually walking in the right direction in this wide open field of motherhood.  You’ll finally realize that no sleep actually means no sleep, and that not having time to cook means toast will be your new standard for a square meal for months on end. You’ll learn that your life never being the same means you trade your Indie music for Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes and your Yoga Journal for endless repetitions of Green Eggs and Ham.  It might take a while for the weight of your life change to totally add up.  A while as in years.  Two to be exact.  At which point you might plunk down in a heap of exhaustion and frazzled nerves with a two year old jabbering about mommy do this and that in one arm and an infant gurgling away in the other.  Then you will smile a wide smile and nod a silent nod.  Because your life really is this awesome.

Though you will give more than you take, make compromises and sacrifices you’d never have accepted when you were childless, and feel that laundry might be the death of you, what it all boils down to is love–more than you could possibly fathom.  You see, the most substantial gift given to parents is the fact that upon becoming one, your heart grows bigger than your ego.  Tenfold.  You’ll live on a high at first, then perhaps sink into depletion.  Even so, as you learn and grow your baby, you will rise up as your heart gradually begins to unfold itself, multiplying in greatness and expansion so that when you are deep in the throes of motherhood and your life is endless cycles of laundry and Elmo songs and little else, you still feel about as lucky as the next lottery winner.  And when, for instance, your barely two year old daughter peers up at you with oceans for eyes and tells you ”Mama my best friend” you will know that scarcely a thing in life means blessed diddly next to your daughter.

Still, you may, as I did, spend two whole years discovering what no one could possibly tell me about parenting.  Some of it may render you weary, but so much of it is the fill-your-heart kind.  Like how no one tells you how your eyes will well with happy tears when you stumble upon your 2 year old daughter patting her fussing 3 month old sister on the back and telling her “it’s okay, I’m here, Evie. Don’t cry. I kiss it.”  They won’t divulge that you will catch a glimpse of her grinning ear to ear, with that right eye scrunched up a tad more than the left in the way that it does, with her blonde curls glowing in the autumn sunlight, and you will suddenly realize how deeply in love you have fallen with your daughter.  They may leave out the part about when you look at her and see so much of your husband and a bit of your father and still pieces of yourself in her that you truly feel a part of this great circle of life as you watch your own legacy of love stand before your eyes.  No one tells you how guided each step of yours will be because of her, how everything you buy, eat, read, and do will be in part if not completely driven by her existence.  No one can quite explain to you how quickly she will grow from a baby into so much of a little girl and how you will grapple with the speed of it and cling desperately to each bit of her even as she slips through your motherly grasp into this great big world.   

Or perhaps they will tell you, just as my mother told me and just as I am now telling you and you might listen and nod as if you understand, but you won’t truly, until finally, you are here.

Someday sooner than I’d like to imagine, you will tote your backpack and clever little noggin off  to grade school, sling your beach towel over your shoulder and walk down to meet your friends at our neighborhood pool, drive away in your first car as your father and I nervously wave you off in the drive, and move away to college or whatever dream pulls you.  Maybe you’ll find your best match and start a family of your own.  Even then, my love, even then when you are 5 feet something tall, have a full head of hair and no longer pronounce your L’s as W’s you will still be my little girl, and I will think of these first two years with you and remember with such clarity the joy, the challenge, the blessing, the personality of sweet, two year old you.

I will recall you eagerly emptying my shoe bins in effort to wear every single pair of mommy’s shoes, be it heels or hiking boots, and how you cry when you face the fact that they are indeed “too tight” which I gather, translates to too big. How could I possibly forget you consistently and hilariously mistaking our cat’s name, Carsi, for Carseat and our yoga sessions for yogurt sessions?  I will cherish how you have a peculiar obsession with band-aids and practically wear them as accessories, most often on your forehead.  I will remember how you love to hide in a game of hide and seek with your rump sticking out from behind the couch or the curtain and how I always pretend not to have spotted you, wriggling and giggling with your rear end like a diapered beacon in the room. I will sigh at the sweet memory of your personality, the songs you sing with such inflection, your infatuation with cheese and squeeze yogurt (which can substitute as lotion) and the way you curl up so eagerly in the fetal position with your stuffed dog under one arm and your baby doll snug under the other as I tuck you in each night.  There is so much of you to remember.  So much of you to hold in my ever expanding heart.

Most poignantly, I will remember your very beginning and how you landed on my chest in the wee hours of that sunny November morning, a full newborn cry filling my ears, and the joy of it all flooding my heart.  

Today you are two. My whole world turned to color on this day two years ago and it hasn’t faded since.

Every bit of awkward adjustment to motherhood is balanced by equivalent delight.  Every second of every day that I hold blonde little you, life through these lenses is changed for the better.

You know, come to think of it, maybe toast is possibly the best meal I ever ate.  Perhaps, Green Eggs and Ham is my favorite book and Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes is the best song ever written, afterall. 

Today,  I smile a wide smile and nod a silent nod because two years with you really is this awesome.

Happy 2nd Birthday Emery! 

Thank you for turning on the lights.

I love you forever,

Mama

I love the crisp feel of the air.   I love that the excitement of the holidays is in the air, but the hustle and bustle of it all is not yet upon us.  I love that it is the month I  became a mother.  I love that November boasts highs in the seventies and often cloudless skies of wide open sunshine.  I love that it is the month of Thanksgiving.  I love that sweet potatoes, pumpkin breads, pears and apples abound.  I love that November seems to provide the opportunity to really sit down and give undying thanks for the life that  has become mine.  To have two healthy children that fill our home with their voices means more to me than I could ever write.  It’s all I’ve ever wanted: a family.  I am eternally grateful for this, for my girls, for this month of celebration and thanks.  

Happy November.

 You may compete against each other for something like the basketball team, or the lead in a one act play or, God forbid, a boyfriend.

Or perhaps you will steal each other’s best designer jeans or lipstick or favorite earrings.

Maybe sometime in the near future you might tell on your sister for not sharing or pulling your hair or for giving you the stink eye and calling you “smelly.”

Inevitably, you will fight in catty ways that only sisters fight.

And when you do, I will show you this:

And tell you that in your beginning you were just two girls, side by side

And that in an entire room of open space

there wasn’t an inch between you

And that despite the sibling rivalry, rest assured my girls, for the rest of your lives each of your best friends will be less best

next to your sister.

The truth is, I love it even when I don’t.

By the grace of God, the gummy grins and cupcake smeared smiles carry more weight than the pull-my-hair-out mommy moments.   They tip the scales considerably, these smiling girls of mine.

But today is not one of those days.

And this is not one of those posts.

know what I mean?

I suppose the reasoning stems from the fact that I have an infant and a not yet two year old.  New babies cry and two year olds do too only louder and with flailing extremeties.  I’m okay with that.  It doesn’t get under my skin like it might for others, but today I had a short fuse.  Lately Emery has been incredibly incorrigible spirited. She wants me to hold her every waking moment and denial of anything (like a kitchen knife or the toilet plunger), and/or unknown variables of all kinds send her into a whine fest or a crumpled blonde mess on the floor. Usually, I have an incredible tolerance for the endless whining or 2 children crying at once and/or holding one child in each arm until my biceps tear while living on granola bars and broken sleep, but today, not so much. It’s accumulated, I’m afraid.

You see, 2 days in a row now I have tried to mail a package at the post office. It’s something I can’t do online or on their automated services. And 2 days in a row I have unloaded 2 small children to attempt to mail a package, which only requires 5 quick minutes of time (that is, if you are parent to perfect angels that you tote around, of course).  The first day we weren’t in the post office for more than 2.7 seconds before Emery miraculously broke off my near death grip on her hand and ran down the long hall of PO boxes squealing and ignoring my firm directions to “stand up, quit crawling like a bear on the dirty floor, you are not a limp noodle so please don’t become one mid stride,  and no, yelling ‘mail’ repeatedly at the top of your lungs is not post office appropriate behavior,” etc, etc, etc. My struggle continued for about 2 and a half more minutes until I had received one too many those-children-are-totally-out-of-control-and-I-wish-you-would-do-us-all-a-favor-and-leave stares and hardly a oh-I-know-how-that-goes-I’ve-been-there-before-you-are-doing-the-best-you-can looks.

Eve rightly complained about all the bending over and toddler chasing I was doing while she was trying to breastfeed in the sling (which was my effort to keep her quiet). So approximately 4 minutes after entering the post office, I exited with two screaming children and an unmailed package. Take two, despite my greatest efforts, was more of the same.

And so today I returned to the car, feeling rather inadequate and yelled at calmly asked Emery to stop crying.   Then I considered crying myself. I didn’t because crying requires energy that I absolutely do not have at the moment and I’m practical like that.  But an hour later, I was at home playing with Emery when she had a tantrum as a result of  a world crisis which involved 1 crayon being stuck in it’s box.   Out came hidden stores of  toddler vengeance as she cleared her table of all the crayons and stickers in two seconds flat, bit the edge of the table to leave teeth marks and took a crayon to the table top. I dissolved the situation to the best of my ability and plopped on the couch, all the while with Eve still sucking my calories away in the sling. 

As if I actually had time to read it, I picked up my latest unread edition of Cooking Light and noted that the pecan encrusted trout with creamy grits sounded delicious. And then, all practicality aside, I cried. Really, it was just a lump in my throat and a few tears welling in my eyes before I had to forgo my self hosted pity party for picking up crayons and agreeing that the spider sticker on Emery’s shirt is indeed scary, but it was as close as I get to crying these days.

I suppose I almost cried  because I was hungry, and that recipe looked so darn good. And because despite my best efforts, I knew I wouldn’t have the time or the energy to make it, or anything that requires two hands for more than 10 minutes anytime soon. It was because my shoulders hurt from holding Eve in a sling practically all hours of every day. And my back hurts from holding Emery simultaneously on my hip when nothing else will do. And because I so miss my yoga classes.  I miss eating cheese and all things dairy, which makes Eve gassy and upset. I miss eating anything at all, which I hardly have time to do anymore. I miss cooking a big Sunday meal. I miss uninterrupted sleep. I miss not feeling like I have to count every freaking penny of monthly expenses since I’m not working anymore. I miss showering regularly.  I miss eating out. I miss guiltless glasses of wine.  I miss going on vacation.  I miss listening to NPR instead of the annoying voice of Elmo’s Song during every single car ride. Seriously, why does his voice have to sound like that?

Mostly, though, I just miss feeling like a really good mother and wife. I’m afraid these days I’m good at meeting my family’s needs, but hardly mediocre at meeting their wants.  The laundry is never done, the dishes sit, the dogs are forgotten and my garden is overgrown and neglected, among a thousand other things.  I feel guilty that my similarly exhausted husband has to deal with a frumpy, hardly productive wife who can’t manage to do minimal housework despite the fact she’s given up her career.  And lets not even mention that I have perpetual spit-up on my cheap, unstylish clothing, have gone 3 too many months without a haircut and highlight; and despite not having time to eat, have managed to hang on to most of my pregnancy weight.  Don’t even go there, I tell you.

This too shall pass, I say with some doubt. It will pass, just wait. Just get through this day, this minute, this moment. It will get easier. 

 And somehow, I always do get through.   And it always does ease up.

Minutes after my pity party for 1, Emery was distracted from her whine marathon by her ”booger,” which is, as she describes with adorable gusto,”soooo big!” And I can’t help but smile. Emery laughs, Eve is quiet, and all is right again. Then Emery falls against my shoulder and gives me a silent hug. Eve wiggles in her pseudo womb and wimpers that sleepy new baby sound that only lasts about this long. In that split second of serenity with my girls, I am reminded that it goes both ways. This too, shall pass. The chubby cheeked bundle in my sling, the snuggly breastfeeding, the moments of comic relief with my not quite two year old, the discovery of boogers and the rest of the world through the eyes of my daughters, who turn what was once jaded into something novel and curious.

And I presume that years from now, I will remember days like today, and only recall what I want to recall of them.  Ironically, I’ll probably recollect that the days, the minutes, the moments, must have passed all too quickly.

Though I look forward to those days of  edited memories and fond nostalgia for this moment, I am trying to be okay with these days as they are, no matter how whiny and unproductive.  I pull out the moments that make me smile and put them away for safekeeping.  All the other moments, I let pass. 

For with my accelerated arrival as a mother of two I have gleaned new perspective that a newborn is easy, a barely toddler is a cinch, but both at once by yourself no matter how grateful you are for their miracle (and I am incredibly grateful), requires daily recital of my mama mantra: “this too shall pass.”  And so it shall.

where the children are always smiling and you can buy fairy tales for 49 cents a pound.

Speaking of happy endings, here’s one of mine:

Hey, Emery, can’t you talk your mom into buying you a different hat already?

Pumpkin Pick up

No better spot than Daddy’s shoulder

Pumpkin Picasso

Umm, Evie? Ya got a few nuts in those cheeks? Savin’ em for later, huh?

I know this is my first trip to a pumpkin patch, it’s a new world to discover and I should be smiling and all, but these CHEEKS! They are so heavy!

I just can’t keep my eyes off of this pumpkin!

I’m practicing my I-can-get-you-to-do-anything-I-want-you-to-do-with-these-eyes eyes. I think I’ve nailed them, yes?

My mother always told me I walk a beautiful path…

Seriously, where was I when God handed out the regular cheeks?

Real men change diapers…And carry around an ridiculously large pink bag in public.

delicious,

organic,

unsalted,

what dessert is made of,

buttah