I’m heading back home this morning. I’ve talked about the emotional quandary this puts me in, ad nauseum, so I won’t go into that again. It is what it is.

One thing I will say is that I’ve noticed myself doing something during this time with the kids that I realized I’ve done all along, but only subconsciously. I caught myself actually taking mental snapshots of them, trying to capture a specific feeling to store in my heart, or a picture to burn into my brain, never to be forgotten. I’ve studied hands and feet, and made mental notes of how the heft of their bodies at age 2.5 months and 2 years 11.5 months, feels in my arms. So many things can be captured on film, but some things can’t; they require being fully present in the moment, using acute observation and awareness to capture their elusiveness.

I realize as I’m sitting here that I do this quite a bit more as I get older. I guess it has to do with the realization that time is passing a lot faster than it used to (You didn’t know this? Yep, scientific fact that it speeds up by about a third every year after age 40 😉 ). There’s an urgency to really live your life, and be fully present in it. When you’re younger, it’s so easy to think you have all the time in the world, and, really, you are swamped with career and family, just trying to keep everyone’s head above water. Certainly you have precious memories of that time, but if you were like me, you were simply trying to make it through the day until you could just sit down for a minute or take a hot bath. You may not have been really intentional about noticing the miraculous wonder of a light bulb going off behind a child’s eyes when they learned something new, or even how beautiful the sunlight looked through the tree in the backyard.

I love how the Bible refers to this act of being present. Mary, the mother of Jesus, even as a very young teenager, knew that something extraordinary was happening in her life and she needed to capture as much as possible.