Mother's Day

On this Mother's Day, I'm staying home from church with a boy and his fever virus.  I don't think this is the first time I've spent Mother's Day home with him.  It's not a bad way to spend the day, snuggled up in bed watching movies.  It also gave me time to pull out a pile of external hard drives and look through the past nearly twelve years of motherhood.

September 2006

This baby girl made me a mother, and I'm so glad it was her.  She was the sweetest baby.

September 2007

One was a golden age of Ella.  She started sleeping.  She was perfectly pleasant all the time.  She was the best of companions.

September 2008

As Ella turned two, I began to think it was time for another little one.

October 2009

Becoming a big sister suited her.

October 2010

We were pretty low-key trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.  No costume for James, a dress-up gown for Ella.  This was part of the long age that James needed a bib at all times.  It's soaked as you can see.

September 2011

We packed a picnic supper one golden night and went to Capitol Park.  I chopped my hair off shortly after this.  I can never make it past that part of growing out hair that just feels like I have hair everywhere all the time.

October 2012

I took the kids on a road trip to North Carolina when one of my nieces was born.  We stopped in Tennessee, and I took them to Cades Cove, destination of all my childhood vacations.  There's particular joy in sharing your childhood with your kids.

September 2013

I had to search through K.J.'s old phone pictures to start finding pictures of me with both kids.  It reminds me I need to be better about getting in photos with them!  I've spent a goodly portion of the past five years reading aloud to those kiddoes.  

September 2014

I remember this day.  We were counting down the hot and sweaty days before we left on our biggest adventure thus far.  They've handled the past three and a half years with so much grace.

September 2015

The amount of change in our lives we experienced from September 2014 to September 2015 is incredible.  How could it all have happened in one year?  This photo was taken after the first day of school for the autumn term.  We'd moved to a new house the day before, and K.J. had to take the car early the next morning to travel to work, so that left us with piles of boxes and our own two feet to get us to school.  Needless to say we were late.  

August 2016

We're waving at K.J. up on the boardwalk above, wheelchair bound because he'd broken his ankle on our first full day back in America in nearly two years.  Can you believe that?  We still can't believe that happened.  Here we are after his surgery on a weekend away with my family.

October 2017

There were a host of things happening in this picture.  I'm sitting down because my foot is giving me so much pain.  We would find out later this week I had a "foreign object" in it.  But this was a beautiful autumn day despite the pain.  

And just like that, eleven years of mothering goes by.  Mothering rubs off a lot of rough edges, and I couldn't ask for two better little people to do the rubbing.

"Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest."

- Ann Voskamp -