Summer Musings

I can't believe our summer is already coming to a close. Now, it will still be hot here for a sweet forever, but stores are running back-to-school sales and the Cowboys have played their first preseason game. (My calendar has always revolved around football games. :))

Anyway, we only have one week left at our summer Mother's Day Out. Now I'm trying to work out our fall schedule with Gymboree, our new MDO program two days a week, music class and MOPS. That sure seems like a lot going on.

And my sister will have her baby in October! So she'll be on maternity leave for a couple of months which means I'll really have to pick it up at work. I think my fall is going to be busy!



I may have mentioned a time or twenty that Andrew is one heck of a climber. When he first started climbing on to our coffee table I would immediately grab him and put him back on the floor. But our den is his main play area and he was climbing up there about ten times a day. So I caved.

Now I take his picture up there.



Many times throughout the day Andrew will walk up to me and put a book in my hand. He loves his books!



We've had such a fun, fun summer. Last summer was fun, too, but it's easier on me to have a 16 month old rather than a four month old. We've spent lots of time in the pool out at my parents, we've played and played in the backyard water table and hose and we've been on lots of walks around the neighborhood.

It's funny to compare this summer to last. Last summer Andrew was still a newborn and he woke up three times a night and nursed 10 times a day. It's so, so much easier to have a 16 month old who is almost weaned and sleeps for 12 hours a night!

But last summer was special in its own way. I grew up a lot last summer, learning that Andrew's needs always came before anything else. On family lake weekends I had to go to bed at 10pm when everyone else was still up playing games because I'd have to be up to feed the baby at 1am, and again at 5am and 7am.

We were not on time for a single event last summer because I could never anticipate how long it would take us all to get out of the house. (Or how long it would take for me to find something to wear that didn't look two sizes too small!)

And we pretty much quit going out to dinner, which is one of my most favorite things to do.

At the time I felt like I was missing out on stuff and making these huge sacrifices. But really I was just doing what had to be done - working my way through the new-mom phase in life. And now it's kind of a big blur and seems like it wasn't really that hard. I mean, I didn't even have to keep him from walking on my kitchen counters last summer!

I was talking about all this with my mom yesterday, which is what prompted this summer retrospective. As I mentioned earlier, my sister is going to have her first baby in October, and I am so, so excited for her. Pretty soon she'll be the one having to go to bed early and wake up in the middle of the night for months on end. (Oh, I pray he's a sleeper!)

And I hope she too will look back next year and think, sure, those newborn months weren't that bad; in fact, they were absolutely wonderful.