Be Thankful

Life goes by so super fast. During the day I feel like I'm just running from place to place and task to task and I don't have too much time to think. But sometimes after the kids go to bed and it's quiet and I'm finally sitting still, I start thinking. And when I start thinking about my boys and how fast they are growing I get soooooooo sad. I mean really really really sad. Last night I crawled in to bed with each one of them and kept kissing them and squeezing them and poking them. I just felt this immense sadness that someday they will be big. They will grow up and leave this house and have families of their own and I will rarely see them or even talk to them probably. I really do not think I will be able to handle that. I feel like a crumbling mess when I think about it. I seriously would rather go to the grocery store or anywhere with one of them than without either. Notice I said ONE of them. Because for some reason one of them is soooo nice. They don't act bad when they are by themselves. Seriously I don't know why that is and if someone knows the reason behind that phenomenon, do share this valuable information. But I got off track a bit. I love being with them. I mean of course I love to have a break and sometimes I lose my cool and sometimes I cringe when I hear "mama can i have some juice?" but in general and 90% of the time, I would rather be with them than without them. Royal and I went to the grocery store tonight and I was so happy to have the company. How will I ever cope when they are all grown up? And furthermore, if I step outside myself long enough to think about them, I start worrying like crazy about how in the world we raise them to be happy, confident, honest and GOOD. How do we do that? I was just reading a family's blog whose daughter commited suicide at age 17 last fall. It's heartbreaking and over and over someone on the blog says "i wish i knew why she did this". I knew this girl and she seemed like a normal sometimes happy and sometimes sullen teenager. How do we know if they are suffering and how do we fix it? I don't know what's wrong with me these past couple of nights. I haven't been drinking or anything. Maybe I should be drinking. Sometimes I really feel like this part of parenting, the part that hurts so much is reason enough not to have any more kids. I mean do I really want to triple this feeling? Ok I guess I'm going to go to bed now because I'm just making myself sadder! Tomorrow is thanksgiving so I will just think of the many things I'm thankful for and snap out of this. I'm copying this idea from a friend's blog, but here are just a few of the things I'm thankful for, in addition to my family and friends of course:

the gym!
my laptop
my blackberry
my cleaning lady
air conditioning!
target
trader joe's
fresca!
diet coke
the minivan, aka super spaceship
friends reruns
the boys' awesome teachers

Maybe God is just trying to remind me (with excellent timing as always) that I need to be thankful for every single second spent with the boys and stop moving so fast and skipping over so much of their lives as little boys. Okay seriously I'm going to bed now.