time flies

You hear parents saying it all the time, and I am just as guilty as most.... "Time flies." 

Something about having children seems to crank life up to warp speed. The days are long but the years are short and I can regularly be heard bemoaning the fact that another month flew by, or that this time last year feels like last week. I've long since accepted that a life that seems to speeding by at a hundred miles an hour, is just a symptom of being a parent... and the plus side is that is really seems to inspire me to cram as much fun into life as I possibly can.

So when I logged on to timehop today to see that on this day three years ago we announced we were expecting our beautiful girl to the world, I had that usual feeling of how time was slipping through my fingers like sand. But there was something else too... something that brought tears to my eyes, something that made me sit and watch that video again for what must be the hundredth time. 

There is something so incredibly strange about watching an earlier version of yourself. I recognise that girl, that family... but at the same time I don't. I watch it and I feel like I'm in on a secret that they have no idea about yet. They don't know yet that the baby they are talking about and thinking about and planning for, is going to be a little girl. They don't know how she is going to turn their lives upside down, but in the best way possible. It feels so strange watching the previous us, because we just had no clue. 

I remember making that video so vividly. I remember how Rich and I laughed hysterically while we took the photos for it. I remember how we struggled to get the cats to play along long enough to get them in on the action too. I remember how we roused a sleepy beautiful boy from his nap to take part in the last few photos we needed. I remember how excited we were, and how we were beginning to picture life as a four. 

But watching it back now it feels like another life. A life before our beautiful girl just, quite honestly, seems impossible to imagine now. We were dreaming and thinking and imagining and making little plans and picturing how it would be... but the reality was and continues to be so much more amazing than we ever could have predicted.

We never could have known when we invisaged our baby boy becoming a big brother, just how close our children would be. And what an utter joy it would be to watch them. We had a baby already and thought we knew what we signing up for, but our beautiful girl was and still is so different from her brother in every single way. And we are learning so much from raising him, and raising her, and raising them together.

I just look back at that announcement and I remember how excited we were... and looking back we just had no idea the enormous lump of amazing that was about to land in our laps. We couldn't have imagined it if we'd tried.

And that is why I'm so glad that I obsessively record our lives the way that I do. Those little flashes back in time are such a beautiful little gift to future versions of us. And when time flies the way it does, I'm so glad to be collecting all these memories of our simple, crazy, happy and beautiful little lives.