Stickers.  Stickers are SO much fun.  As any parent knows, there comes a period of time where stickers rule the house.  They appear everywhere – my kids enjoy putting them on their bodies and all over books.  Sometimes they make it onto the floor which is not so good as we usually only find them a few days later when they have become permanently adhered and we need to use a scraper.  But I digress.  Stickers are AWESOME for little kids.  Layne just discovered them and has a slight obsession with putting them on her elbows (probably because that is her newest body part she can say) and her belly under her shirt.  AND she discovered that in the back of Nolan’s books there are sometimes a few pages of stickers.  She has been sick recently and, like most great mommies (HA!), I have been letting her do pretty much anything she wants as long as she is happy.  The other day it was sneaking Nolan’s book out of his room and letting her go to town getting the stickers off of the pages and putting them on herself and then the book.  Just a few quiet minutes of pure happiness for my baby girl 🙂

Just don’t tell Nolan half of his stickers are missing.

Five years.

Five long and very short years.  Today, you, our first baby, turn five.  I just keep saying it over and over.  Five.  Five.  FIVE.

I mean, how is it even possible?  Where did this come from and how did it happen?  Weren’t you just born?  Weren’t we just planning your first birthday party?  We looked down and stopped paying attention for a little bit and you grew up.  You have lost all vestiges of baby.  You are full blown BOY now.  It seems like every day, I want to freeze you in time just as you are.  You tell wonderful and nonsensical jokes.  You love Scooby Doo, Penguins of Madagascar and CyberChase.  You read – you devour every book we bring home and finish chapter books in less than a day.  You are doing math and writing, you are speaking more and more Spanish (which I love by the way).  You make up songs all of the time and are so incredibly creative.  You will dance until you can’t stand up anymore.  You run around the block because you can and occasionally get on the bike, though you are still scared of falling off.  You can pump on the swings and get yourself super high and go down the biggest slides at the park.  You love rain puddles and ask when it’s going to snow because you already have plans for snowmen.  You hum and sing Christmas songs all of the time.  You love the beach and sand as long as you don’t have to go into the water.  You love all things cool-science-experiment related – you are fascinated to learn anything new and will tell everyone anything.  You will talk to a rock 🙂

You absolutely adore your sister, (until you don’t anymore and want her to leave you alone).  But most of the time, you adore her.  While you do still have your occasional moments, you are so kind and loving towards her and towards us.  You give hugs and kisses as frequently as tickles and raspberries.  You ask for dessert every single night, making sure to eat enough dinner that you get it.  You love tacos and mac and cheese and hot dogs and anything pasta as long as there is no sauce involved.  You love getting new shoes because you believe they will make you jump higher and new clothes because it means you are growing.  Even if you do let out some tears in the process while letting go of the clothes that you’ve grown out of.  (It’s okay, bud, I cry a little too when we pack away those too-small clothes.)  Though you are a big kid physically, you are still a gentle soul inside of that body.

I can’t really put into words everything I feel, because this birthday has been harder for me than the others.  You are a delight.  You make us laugh and cry.  You make our hearts sing.  Thank you for being wonderful.  Thank you for being more incredible than your dad and I ever imagined you would be.  And thank you for bringing more joy to our lives than we ever could have dreamed. You may be five and you may be a big boy now, but you will always ALWAYS be our baby.

(P.S.  Thanks for hanging out with me last night for your photo shoot and chasing the sun with me.  I love you.)

A friend on one of the forums that I participate regularly in challenged all of us to document our lives for part of the weekend the weekend.  “Hmmmmm” I thought.  In the class that I teach moms and dads, I stress not missing the moments of life and that it’s all well and good to learn to get off of Auto but you should do whatever you need to to not miss things.  Yeah.  Meet the hypocrite.  I rarely just relax and take pictures of my family.  I always feel that everything has to be perfect.  I full edit each photo.  Even on my personal family blog, the photo doesn’t go up unless it’s edited.  I always shoot in full manual and won’t take a picture if I really hate the outfit they are wearing.  Documenting a day / weekend was much harder in real life than it sounded at first.

But I did it.

Nolan turns five next month.  (!!!!!)  And Layne will be two before I know it.  And I had to make myself realize that sometimes, it’s okay to just shoot.  For the photographers out there, I put my camera on Auto-ISO and Aperture priority and clicked away.  That is as close to auto as I could get.  Yes, I did edit them, but it was just a batch process on all of them at once with my basic workflow action with no tweaking of individual photos.  (Don’t get me wrong.  Some of the ones that I really love I pulled out and fully edited for myself.)  I love them.  I am not IN love with them, but I do love them.  The mommy in me loves them.  The photographer in me kind of cringes to be 100% honest because they are not my 100% best work.  But it’s real.  It’s life.  It’s my weekend.  It’s my family.

(And it should be noted that I did miss a shot – my husband heading out the door in scrubs when he got called in for a c-section conveniently before bedtime – but I did take a photo of his dreaded beeper and cell phone.  😉 )  Also missing is our game of bocce where Layne kept trying to bring back to us all of the balls we were throwing.   And BTW I have absolutely NO idea what Nolan was doing in the center photo of the first collage.  None.

Just a snapshot tonight with my rental lens.  I know I am going to fall in love with it.  Sigh.  When did he get so big?  Five in less than two months…