Today, I'm grateful for getting to stay home with my babies. Grateful that I woke up to feed Grey at 5:30, and was able to go back and lay in the bed another hour without the stress of the workday crushing my chest. Grateful that I showered, put on a favorite pair of green lounge pants and a grey wool sweater, brushed through my wet hair and was at that point "dressed" for the day.
When I went back to work after having Story a friend encouraged me by saying that when she went back to work it helped her to be really intentional about parenting in the time she had with her children. I get that. I feel the same way. It's easy to get distracted by lesser things when you feel like you have the whole day ahead of you. Sometimes choosing to nurture is hard when you feel like you can just do it later.
Another friend warned me, before I ever had children, that the hardest part about staying home is that it's a 24/7 gig. And that's true too. There are days when it's 9PM and I've been spit-up on all day and someone has cried at least every half hour, and the laundry pile seems to have spread like some sort of Dreft-scented fungus, even though I've spent ten consecutive hours trying to contain it.
But today, I'm super grateful that I get to be home with my littles. That I get to walk Story into preschool and stay until she washes her hands and settles in to play. That I get to give Grey some serious snuggles this afternoon (he was a little neglected yesterday as I scrambled to get the house cleaned up for our little Halloween shindig). That we will spend a sunny afternoon in our yard, looking for some fun.
Work will come again, and there's merit in schedules, routines and a hard day's labor out in the world. But today, I'm grateful to have the time and space and lack of external pressure so that I can just "be" with these little people. I can take them in, in all their sweetness and dirtiness and crankiness, and taste how sweet it is to be their mother.
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