The days are long and the years are short

Oh, I like my highlights in that picture.  I need to get my hair did.

A sitter let her sleep on the dog bed.  Yes, we got the sitter again.

Modern Day Eves.

Daddy's little helper.

Mills isn't quite sure if she is ready to share the spotlight.

Eves at the Lake.  Love.

So "clute".  How Eves pronounces "cute".

Always "helping" her Mom Mom.

Gawd.  I LOVE my hair color there.  I need to get my bangs trimmed, too.  Oh, this pic's not about me?  Sorry.

First dentist appt.

My baby, Eva, is turning 5 years-old today.  I cannot believe that it has been five years since I had my last child.  For a while, there, I felt like I would just be having children forever, like it was some purgatory I had been sentenced to, for all that Miller Lite I consumed in high school. 

Anyway, we have several nicknames for Eva - Eves, Eaver Beaver, which became Beaver (I know what you all are thinking), and then that incarnation just became "The Beav," which is a reference only I get because I am old.  She drops her S's, and pronounces her R's as W's, as in "Today is 'pecial, because today is my Biwfday.  I hope I get that 'tuffed aminal tewwiew dog at dat one 'towe we went to."

She loves her Momma ALL DAY LONG, and she drives her crazy by asking for snacks that are not found in the refrigerator or pantry.  She will ask for watermelon or raspberries in the dead of winter several times a day.  She watches Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in between asking for snacks, and she "helps her Mom with EVERYTHING, especially the laundry and the swiffer wet jet.  She can drain that bitch by cleaning a three foot square area in minutes. 

She likes to swing on the swing out in the front yard that hangs off of this big old tree, and she always looks back at me on that first swing with the biggest smile you have ever seen.  It melts my heart every time.  I just know her tummy is doing a little flip flop, because I remember what that felt like, even today.

I am having one of those moments where I feel like life goes really fast and slow at the same time.  I will never forget one time when I was in the grocery line with all three kids and they were all acting like heathens, and I was beginning to get tears in my eyes because the people behind me were opting for other lines that were even longer than mine, and an older woman who had been watching the whole thing from the line next to me, tapped me on the arm and said, "Honey, the days are long and the years are short."

One of my favorite quotes....EVER.  I think that prophecy can be applied to just life, in general - high school, college, marriage - why, it seems like just yesterday that I was gazing into my blushing (really, he looked kinda washed out and scared on our wedding day, but whatever) groom's eyes at the alter,  but is especially poignant when it comes to raising your children. 


I mean, you hit milestones, and you're all "Where did the time go?" and all those sappy, predictable bullshit cliche's, but if you had asked me four and a half years ago, when I had a 6-month old, a 3-year-old, and a 5-year-old, I was watching the clock, quite a bit (mostly waiting for 5 o'clock, ya' dig?).

Which brings me to my "Live in the Moment" monologue I keep pushin' on y'all.  You may as well, because memory is fuzzy.  That is why we have more than one child - we forget the misery.  But, once you are finished with high school, or college, or child-rearing, or your partner for life dies - all you can do is romanticize your memories.

I guess that is why God invented the camera.

I was torturing my baby at bedtime, trying to get a Christmas photo and SHE WOULD NOT COOPERATE.  Looking back on it, it does look like her headband is tight.

I guess what I am trying to say here, and what that woman in line beside me was trying to say, is that you may as well romanticize your memories while you are living them, so that you enjoy your life, while that life is happening. Listen, I am not talking about the winter watermelon, here, those are the memories I like to conveniently forget because those are the memories where I lose my cool.  I am talking about playing the "selective memory" game, where you live in the moment when they are looking back at you from high up in the treetops with a smile on their face, not the memory where you are yelling at them because they "know good and well that there is no freaking watermelon in the refrigerator in mid-January!  Now, go watch your Mickey Mouse!"

Seriously, Eves, you are the light of my life and I hope you have the best biwfday EVER.  Now, lets go get some overpriced, mealy watermelon at the Giant Eagle Supasto' and then have them fry up that rice and veggie stir fry you like so much, and then we can pick out your birthday cookies for your school party - you know, the heart ones, that have the red and pink icing - because I, of all people know that you only turn FIVE once!