38

And just like that I am 38.  An entire year after an initial winter hiatus on blogging, here I sit, musing, as my youngest daughter approaches school in September, we celebrate living in Kent for the last six years, not to mention ten years of marriage up next and all that that time passing evokes.

Before we lived here, we were in a postage stamp sized flat in London, and like so many others we had to move out to expand our square footage and accommodate a growing family.  My middle daughter was just 3 months old when we relocated so she doesn’t remember the big smoke a jot, and my eldest, then approaching three, can barely recall it.  Only a little snippet here and there of bus rides and zoo trips and counting all the different coloured front doors.

So on this day, freshly 38, I am reminded of the state of things when the girls were so much smaller than they are now.  Looking at photos of them now I forgot that they were ever all so little.  So teeny and fun and hard and crazy and shouty and brilliant.  I was a baby making factory with a two year turnover for a moment there.  And now I am not. Now I am D. O. N. E.  Now I get to sit back and watch them grow.  The nappy days are (very almost completely) over.  The uncontrollable crying over a wrong spoon, a poorly arranged plate, the mistrustful broccoli and ill fitting Elsa costumes of yesteryear – all slowly but surely waning into our history.  And the tugging on my leg. All. Day. Long.

But just as I cry the night before each of their birthdays, as another year rolls by and as I cannot stop these beauteous beings from growing older, I bid farewell to being a mummy of very young kids.  I still stropped ahead of my birthday and then I breathed.  And I said hello to new beginnings.  Only two years until 40 and the decade I am entitling as MINE.  Heres to 38 and feeling fabulous.  Better than I did at 28 and many of the years in between.  Heres to more sleep and less goo.  Here’s to growing up.  Everywhere.

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