The first two images in the post below are our little guy at two months. The rest are him in all his ten-month-old glory.
When you’re the firstborn, you get your three month, six month, nine month …. and every milestone in between, tirelessly documented by parents frothing with pride and joy. And rightly so. Kids are amazing miracles. 
When I’m editing my photos so that the sheer magnitude of them won’t take down our desktop computer, it kills me to delete those blurry shots or ones where every child but one is blinking – and that one child is in the middle of the zombie faces beaming, but there is no way to crop out everyone else so that it looks normal.
Problems of a perfectionist? Perhaps.
In the name of doing things partway rather than not at all, I wanted to give a nod to our youngest, who is not at any official milestone right now (except that everything a baby does in its first two years is amazing).
My two middle littles are often up to no good. At 5 and 6 and a half, they are always scheming and dreaming, and don’t always think about the consequences. Consequences of things like, pouring water in a trash can with apple cores and diapers in it and letting it sit for a week (talk about a home brew), or drawing tiny people with speech bubbles above their heads that say “Mom” on the trim work all over the house, or bringing a little container full of bugs into the house and losing track of it.
Then, sometimes they come up with fantastic ideas. Like the quiet time last week when they completely detailed their room, including dumping out drawers, refolding everything, and putting it away in neat little stacks. I was so impressed, I told their dad. He then congratulated them and offered to have them organize his drawers for a little cash.
What do you know about Sarajevo? I remember a number of current events from my childhood, the space shuttle Challenger, Operation Dessert Storm, the Rwandan Genocide. I remembered the name Sarajevo, but I didn’t know much about what had happened there.
I found Flowers for Sarajevo, by John McCutcheon, illustrated by Kristy Caldwell, at our library. I don’t even think I opened it, but the cover art was so arresting I was sure I would like it.
Weeks passed as it floated around our house. I couldn’t seem to sit down long enough to read it to everyone. We already read aloud for school each day and I have been flirting with homeschool burnout; adding more books didn’t feel doable.
My mom finally read the book to the kids one weekend when she was here for a visit. She reported it made her cry, along with my youngest daughter.
Finally, I read it. To myself. The kids were in bed as I paged through the story. The illustrations were as amazing as the cover. They reminded me of graphic novel art, and the colors and lines communicate such beauty. I finished it at 1:30 a.m. on a night when my own home felt like a war zone.
I’ve found tremendous relief in the fact that it is no longer considered scientifically sound to lump men and women into one muddy pot where everyone is human, but just barely. There were two problems with that for me. One, men and women ARE different. And two, when we generalize, men usually win. And when women lose, everyone loses.
So today I want to talk about two of the many books I’ve picked up recently as I have made improving my marriage my job. The Female Brain, and The Male Brain, both by Louann Brizendine, M.D. I didn’t expect to learn so much about relating to other human beings, or that it would change the way I think about my kids.
Hard to believe we met in our 20’s and are now staring down 40. Well, one of us is. I still have a couple of years left. 😉
This has been the hardest year of our married lives, and one of the hardest of our whole lives – it feels unfair at times because at our age, it seems like we should have started to figure things out.
I hope this period of growth is something we can look back on as the start of something even better than what we already knew.
So many of the photos I found were of Cylon in Dad mode:
helping kids,
holding kids, carrying them where they needed to go. 
And smiling with them.
Happy 40th Birthday to the precious soul I am privileged to do life with.
