Life during mommy-hood is often chaotic, stressful, and anything but glamorous. There are endless messes of food trails, drink spills and muddy footprints to wipe up. From the very second you open your eyes and way before the coffee kicks in, you are on high demand to these tiny humans you’ve created…and the dog…and the cat…and your spouse…they all NEED you! Whew! Within the first hour of the day you find yourself longing for a clean house, quietness, and no demands, right? I was right there with you wishing for those very things too until one day I read an article someone had shared on Facebook. It was about vacuum lines. That sounds like the craziest thing to write an article about, but the title intrigued me and I started to read. The author, a mother of grown children, was writing about her own hectic life she lived while raising her children and how she longed for the days when the house wouldn’t be cluttered with toys, sports gear, etc. She longed for the days when she could clean the house and the vacuum lines would actually last longer than five minutes. Fast forward several years and now here she was with her children grown, living in other cities with busy lives and too busy for her. All she had were the vacuum lines she had longed for earlier in life. I’m pretty sure that if you aren’t sobbing by the end of her article, you might not be human. 🤷🏻‍♀️ We can all relate to that story, at least the first part anyways, but we fail to miss the many important moments that come before the vacuum lines.

I’m fortunate enough to be the baby of four kids. It took me a long time to see that as fortunate because I was always the last to get to do things. However, I’ve come to realize it’s a pretty great title. It’s great because I have the advantage in learning life. I got to see my siblings in their early stages of marriage. I got to see how babies change the dynamics of everyday life. I saw as my nieces and nephews evolved from children to teens and now to adults. I had the sideline advantage of watching how the game was played before I was thrown onto the field. I gained perspective on how my own boys would push my buttons and challenge me in the days to come because of being the baby. I also began to understand some of the sadness that parents feel when their children are grown and begin stepping out on their own. They are no longer needy like they once were, and that’s a hard transition for parents. I think for many of us, that’s what we think is the first defining moment that the story shifts, but the truth is, there are so many ones that come before.

My boys are currently five and ten. Even though most days my house is litered with soccer cleats, baseball bats, muddy tennis shoes and gummie wrappers left on the coffee table, I know that in a quick blink these things will be replaced with perfectly clean floors, a tidy living room and silence that’s just too loud. Even right now while I’m still in the midst of the chaos I look around and wonder where the baby swing went? What happened to the Diaper Genie? Where did all of the brightly colored, annoyingly noisy toys go? They’ve all been replaced with Super Hero’s, Legos, baseball cards, Nerf Guns and electronics. This is when it hits me hard in the face (like when you walk full force into a glass door ((not that I’ve done that) kind of hard). The wheels in my brain start turning backwards and I start wondering when was the last time I gave my baby a bottle? When was his last diaper change? When was the last time I rocked him to sleep in my arms? When was the last time he was little enough to fit in my arms? I experienced these last moments without even knowing they were the last. These should have been defining moments to cherish in my parenthood journey, but they slipped by unnoticed and now I long for them. I was so busy wishing to be out of those stages and focusing on the “firsts” that I totally and completely missed out on these tiny beautiful “last” moments. This my friends, makes me cry. It breaks my heart to realize these moments are gone and it makes me realize that I must try my absolute hardest to live in the moment from here on out.

This AH-HA realization happened about a year ago. I’m not really sure what triggered it, but one day I realized that my oldest wasn’t asking me to sit down and play cars anymore. That was his favorite thing to do in his toddler and pre-school years. At the time, I’ll be honest in that I often cringed silently when he’d ask because I didn’t enjoy sitting on the floor for hours and I had a million other things I needed to be doing. At this moment of realization, something popped into my head that I had read before. The things that seem little and unimportant to us are often big, important things in the eyes of a child. When we dismiss those things as unimportant, we are communicating to our child that they are unimportant. Hmm, think on that for a moment. That was never my intention at all, but eventually that’s what a child learns from that behavior and they will altogether just stop asking. Wow, I definitely had a parenting fail there, but I have a feeling I’m not alone.

So, how do we live in the moment? The best advice I can give is to be intentional with your time and your focus. If you work from home like I do, break your day into chunks of time. When it’s not your work time, put your laptop, phone, notes away. Be present with your kids and focus on them. Even if they want you to play cars on the floor, do it. When they need a drink of water for the fifth time at bedtime, choke back the urge to scream and give them grace. When they bring you weeds disguised as flowers, scoop them up in a hug and say thank you. Do these things even when you don’t want to, because God saw you fit to be the very first hero your child ever looks up to. Their ultimate goal in the beginning years is to seek your praise and approval in all that they do. They watch you, they learn from you and eventually they will become exactly like you- or vow to be absolutely nothing like you. Which option do you hope they choose? I know for me I’m striving each day to focus on the little things, find joy in the simplicity of a hand picked bouquet of yellow weeds and beauty in the fiery colors of a brilliant sunset. I’m trying to teach my kids to do the same. I’m trying to help them see beauty and peace in places that most would overlook, because that’s what it means to live in the moment. Do I still fail daily at being a great parent? Absolutely! Do I still cringe when my boys ask me to do certain things? Yeah, I do. But I know that I’m far from perfect and my boys don’t need a perfect mom, they just need a mom that loves them, protects them and embraces the big and little moments with them. You see, I don’t want to only have vacumm lines left when I’m older. In fact, I’d be content to never have vacuum lines because hopefully that means I’ve not only got my grown guys hanging around, but my grandchildren too. ❤️