Gummy Bear?

There's a saying that goes around in the moms-of-young-kids crowd. Something to the effect of "the days are long but the weeks are short," or "the days are long but the years are short," or something like that.  Obviously this is a nice way of imploring parents to look up for a moment and be aware of where they are, and take it in, even the gross/difficult/painful/maddening/eyeball-poking parts, because way too soon it will be memories. I talk with moms of grown kids often and without exception they say it flies by.

I just want to go on record and say that my days are not long, and it is all flying by. Every single day.  Now I assume this doesn't feel true for everyone, but I also know I'm not the only one. Perhaps it is some sort of supernatural mercy from God because he knows there is only a certain amount of poo I can handle in a single day, and if my days were any longer there would be a serious breach of the poo quota, and the household would dissolve into poo anarchy or something; I dunno.  He also sees how we handle the witching hour, and I think maybe he knows that once the children start screaming the only answer is to bathe them and send them to bed, so I would be gratefully unsurprised if he were shaving a few minutes off somewhere in there, because from 3 pm on it is a break-neck pace around the Skerrib house.

Every week I sit with my calendar for a few minutes and write down the major activities of each day. This is to avoid missing appointments and such, and is about 80% effective (but not foolproof, as I've found a few times). Sunday evenings I will look toward Friday and think it is Sooooo far away, but like 10 minutes later here I am late Thursday evening wondering where the week went.

I mean, I know where it went--I can break each day into 1-2 hour blocks and tell you pretty much what I was doing during each one, and which ones I used to preserve mental health instead of tackling another task.  Which ones I did what I planned or at least "should have done," and which ones went a little wonky due to outside forces (poo or otherwise).

This is all to say, I know. I see it. My crazies are shooting up out of the ground like little dandelions, way too fast. His Highness is getting all leggy and moving toward bigger boy-ness, and the Littler One scales shelves like Spiderman. As for Tiny E, somehow she picked up complete sentences from her brothers and enjoys informing me how things are going to be: "No mom, I wanna sit here," and so on.

I find myself thinking about Ferris Bueller's advice--"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it," and I think he was definitely onto something, even (or maybe especially) for those of us in the young kids season.

Heck, who am I kidding. Just because I deal with poo more than average doesn't give me some sort of special life standing or unique insight (except for the poo itself--I really do have a lot of knowledge and experience with it).  Ferris's advice is good for everyone, at any stage.

It's Friday, kids. Take a look around and see where you are. Make note of it. Then go forth and do something (or maybe nothing? On purpose?) to mark it somehow...