Parenthood

It’s been two years since we brought Aaron home from the hospital and some days it still doesn’t feel real that Neal and I are parents. When we first brought Aaron home from the hospital, I used to think how strange it was that I had a baby. It felt like I was just babysitting someone else’s kid. When I was pregnant with Jonah, Neal said it was sometimes still strange for him to tell people that he has one kid, and here is was getting ready to have “kids”, plural.

But then there are moments when the reality hits me that we really do have “kids”; that we are parents. And surprisingly, that realization doesn’t always come in the moments you would expect it to. It doesn’t come with the 1234923459 diapers I change in 24 hours. It doesn’t come at 2:30 in the morning when I'm up with a hungry, crying baby. It doesn’t even come when said baby has just vomited exorcist-style all over me at 2:45 in the morning.

The realization that we are parents comes in the little things. Like when I am soaking in my bathtub and look up to find several foam sea creatures, a toy shark, and an Elmo loofah are all staring back at me. Or when I’m cleaning my floors and go to sweep behind a door, only to find a little boy’s sippy cup sitting in the floor, where he left it when he was playing hide and seek with his daddy. It’s the binky’s on my nightstand, the PBS cartoons in our Netflix queue, and crayon scribbles on my tile floor.

It's in those moments that it gets real; that I realize it’s not just Neal and I that live here anymore. We now share our home with two sweet, little boys. And they don’t belong to anyone else. They belong to us.

What a crazy thought.

What a huge blessing.
What a great responsibility.

Aaron will be turning two next week and last night he slept in a “big boy bed” for the first time. I was so excited for him to take that step into big boy-hood, and yet so sad that my first baby was growing up so quickly. Jonah is the baby in our family now, but I know I will blink and he will be the one in the big boy bed and Aaron will be getting ready for elementary school.

It’s been said that a parent has approximately 900-ish weeks from the time a child is born until he/she graduates from high school. That’s the number of weeks parents have to lead, love, teach and impact their children before they move out and begin to face the world on their own. 900 weeks can sound like a lot of time, but any parent will tell you that it moves quite quickly.

There’s this awesome app called the Legacy app (brought to you by the always-awesome Orange Group) that can help you calculate how many weeks you have left with your child. Last year around this time, I downloaded the app and took a screenshot of how many weeks we had left with Aaron…

  

This is how many we have left as of today...

That’s a crazy difference.

And Jonah is only 6.5 weeks old and already our time with him is moving quickly.

When I really stop to think about this, I realize that Neal and I can’t take for granted the fact that we really are parents to these two sweet, little boys that share our home. 

We're not buddies. 

We're not playmates. 

And we're not baby-sitters. 

We are parents. 

And we can’t forget that with that title comes a huge amount of responsibility. God has already put so many wonderful friends and family in the lives of our boys that will help us teach them about the Lord. But they are not the ones that God will hold accountable for whether our children were raised to love, honor and obey Him. That responsibility falls on Neal and I. And we have to get serious about the time we are given to make that impact.

So, I’m thankful for the dirty diapers. I’m thankful for the vomit. I’m thankful for the millions of toys strewn around my house and the sippy cups hidden behind doors. I’m thankful for these daily reminders that, as strange as it still may seem, Neal and I really are parents now. God has blessed us with two adorable, blue-eyed boys and given us the responsibility of sharing His love with them each and every day. I'm thankful for all the little things He puts in my way to remind me of this fact and to help me make the most of the time we have with them.