On Appreciating what I have...

Its been a while since I've written anything because life has been madness for nearly a month. B has worked constant overtime, E is in the throes of the terrible two's (I have joked with some friends that if the three's truly are worse as the mothers of all three year olds say, I'm running away to Cabo), K is working on her first tooth and crawling simultaneously, I'm trying to get out and enjoy more photography and the house is forever getting more and more bogged down in the mess of everyday living. I'm exhausted just typing that out. But in being so exhausted I find myself (far too often) losing sight of the things in my life I ought to appreciate.

I find myself getting annoyed with E and her constant toddlerisms- the "why's", the "no's" and the "mine's" alone are enough to grate on my nerves, but in conjunction with her sudden picky eating and whining about everything and anything I sometimes sit at the dinner table thinking, How long until bedtime?. In these moments I forget all the funny, wonderful things about this age. That she loves all dogs indiscriminately, that she declares "I a doctor" and applies bandaids asking "It hurt?" with such compassion, that books hold so much wonder for her she'll gladly go to bed to read them. I'm forgetting that E won't be this small and sweet and all over me forever.

Often I envy my husband because he gets to leave the house everyday and talk to adults. He gets to still be seen as something other than "E and K's Daddy". He has much more freedom even in the house because the girls aren't constantly starfished to him. And when I think these things I am forgetting that he is giving up so much so I can stay home and raise our girls. I lose sight of the fact that he's tired from working around the clock and that he carries demands on his from within and outside of our family. I'm forgetting that B is the man that I love and that he is walking an equally hard line every single day without complaint.

There are days that my sweet, innocent little K almost drives me to drink with her level of neediness. Her constant mommy preference is exhausting and her pre-crawling frustration makes her miserable to be around by the end of the day. But I need to remember that her neediness is largely courtesy of our hard-won nursing relationship that I yearned for with E.  I need to see that the second she can crawl she won't want as many mommy snuggles or to be carried everywhere. I'm forgetting that K is a genuinely wonderful baby who is far too quickly losing her babyhood.

I struggle to enjoy photography as much lately because I want to be as good as people who've been doing it much longer. I pale at the thought of anyone entering my home because of the state of it. I am desperate to get out from under the weight of my OCD. There's so much negativity in me right now that everything is just so hard. And that's why I have to remind myself that I am very blessed...

Every single day.