Two years, 364 days

I've been mustering the strength for about a week now to come to grips that Mason's days of being referred to as two are numbered.

Here it is. His last day, as I promised him this morning.

There are moments in my life, as a mom now, when a milestone takes place or a birthday arrives seemingly out of the blue and I'm forced to acknowledge the notion that life speeds quickly out of our control when we want it to slow to enjoy the simplicity a bit longer.

Three years ago I sat right now uncomfortably awaiting my first epidural. I had been in labor since 11 am that morning, and wouldn't meet Mason until 3:22 am the following day.

Sometimes I feel like I've been a mom forever but it's only been three short years. How strange it feels that my life has spun on its side a hundred times over in those 1,094 days. What was life before motherhood? It was predictable. It was extra sleep time on Saturday mornings. It was planning my dinners at a whim in the grocery store, and if I couldn't summon the energy to cook Tuesday through Friday- I didn't. I wasn't putting out fires every hour on the hour between two unruly toddlers. I had no gray hairs in sight.

And then he happened. Mason Paul. His pink pudgy skin, tiny button nose, and rosy cheeks to match his plump baby lips was all it took for my heart to just double over in size. His cries stood out over the other twelve babies in the hospital nursery and the newborn cry was mine to respond, and I couldn't wait. He belonged to me, his heart forever a part of mine, and my life was forever changed.

I absolutely miss Mason being a baby. Have another? Not likely. It's my babies being babies that I miss and surely always will. But I also love the stages they're in now. In honor of Mason I absolutely love listening to him talk passionately about every object somehow relating to trucks. His swing, his bed, the IKEA chairs in the basement-- they are all trucks, big big trucks. And when he says anything in reference to a truck, his small voice drops an octave sounding too masculine for a toddler. But in his mind, he's growing up to become a man every day, another step closer.

He tells me about every other day that when he's soon fifteen he's going to be on the football team. He's going to become a firefighter or a teacher like Daddy and someday he's going to go to the big big school like his older sister- and again his voice oddly becomes purposely and unnaturally deep. Incessantly, he fixes things that needn't be fixed but still insists the chairs are broken, the pipes need tightened or the screws in his tricycle are loose. His tools in nature are twigs, and he can honestly decipher among the 57 twigs of debris in our yard which one exactly he played with yesterday afternoon. And off he goes into the dirt pit of the jungle gym making power drill noises with his mouth telling me he's fixing the broken house.

And it is a chapter book I continue to write by the hour with my kids that truly causes me to question how exactly I ever considered my life fulfilling before the gray hairs, a small cosmetic infraction, of motherhood bestowed upon me. After all, that is just a minor problem, and nothing that can't be covered quite simply with a box of Clairol.

But this book of motherhood, could obviously not exist without my boys.

And so, with that, I tip my hat and my heart to you Mason. Happy Birthday little man.

I love you to the moon, over to the sun around the stars and back.