Sunday, August 31, 2014

35/52




- Poppet, just home from a 'rainbow' party and sitting in the windowsill.

-Littlest's darling little fingers. The strange thing about babies is how perfectly they're designed to be absolutely and completely adorable in every way. Except perhaps the waking up all through the night bit.

-Sprocket, upside down on the trampoline. He's just had a rather brutal haircut and I'm taking awhile to grow used to it. (The boy before us in line at the barber had his head shaved, so this was a compromise!) He looks so much older, such a school kid, but the thing about hair? It grows back...

Joining with the lovely Jodi for a portrait of my children every most some weeks in 2014. 

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Librarian Queen Mummy - Returning to 'Work'

"Are you going to be a doctor like daddy?" we asked Poppet recently, as she played with her daddy's stethoscope (carefully sterilised). 

"No! I'm going to be a Librarian Queen Mummy like Mummy!" my Poppet exclaimed. 

While my heart did a little giddy flip at the sweetness of her, my work is also something I've been thinking about a lot recently, as I've started back doing a shift a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on how swaps work out.


This is the earliest I've started back at 'work' after a baby and I feel incredibly blessed that it all works so perfectly. I'm doing very short shifts and my parents are happy to make the 6 hour round trip to look after Littlest while I'm away during the week, while on my weekend shifts my beloved mans up and takes on the three wee ones solo (Flatteringly, he does look a little frazzled when I trip gaily up to the front door on my return, rested. recharged and eager to hug my beaming, filthy delights.) 

Financially, I'm not entirely sure if it evens out - just look at the time involved on my parents behalf - that's a combined twenty of their hours for my four hour shift, not to mention train tickets etc. Yes, they get to spend uninterrupted baby time... but that's a massive commitment, which I'm very grateful for and I fully understand would not be an option for everyone. 

What it comes down to for us is keeping choices and options open.

Yes, my Beloved is nearly finished his degree, but life and fate are capricious - you just never know what's going to happen. It's not a 'life is capricious now', life and work have always been capricious. 

We, in (most) of the west, finally have some kind of backup, but I still think it's good to be prepared. 

Keeping my skills relevant, my references relevant, as well as my Beloved's, is something we believe is important as a family, even if I never work full time again - although the likelihood is that I will.

So I'm waking in the middle of the night to express milk, trying to remember to put in breast pads (the wet-patched-chest look isn't the most sophisticated around) giving my dusty work shoes a quick once over with baby wipes and back in the paid workforce again, if only very casually, and only till Christmas. 

My beloved is spending quality, one on one, time with the kids and my parents, remembering how hard it was for my mum to re-enter the workforce after a long child-raising break, are making the mammoth journey.

I'm so very grateful that my work is so flexible (short as my shift is one of my supervisors told me I'd be welcome to bring Littlest to feed, or have her brought to me. Luckily Littlest is taking happily to the bottle... although there was that one time when Sprocket drank her milk and she was a wee tad hangry when I returned...)

I'm returning from work loaded up with books about childhood, motherhood, mothers negotiating childhood in todays world and the nature of work in todays world. (This time I'll return them on time, honest. Ish.)

My brain is slowly fluttering back into action - not that this is a result neccesarily of returning to work - more a confluence of happenings. 

I'm curious abo
ut how other mothers negotiate paid work and work in the home, their choices about when to return to work and when to give it away and what motivates/motivated you.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Hurtling


The sky is grey. The rain falls gently. 

I look at my girls - the baby, the four year old, I look at the sky and soft falling rain. The rain - although barely more than a drizzle, is going nowhere. Then I go and find rain coats. I slip the baby into the pusher, wrap her in blankets, cover the pusher with its clear plastic rain coat, put my own coat on, my four year olds. 


And we're away, the rain coming and going as we complete our errands - here, there, back again and over there, while the four year old gets in and out of the second seat of the pusher, her coat coming off and going back on and the rain continues softly falling and the world is slow, close, immediate; the air brisk. 


And I wonder why I don't do this more. 


The kids and I spend a lot of time hurtling around in our car. In a normal day the minimum that Littlest and I spend driving is an hour for the school runs - four fifteen minute trips. In a day when we're dropping off and/or picking up my Beloved from a far-flung hospital, or driving into Melbourne or all of the above it can be up to six hours. 


This seems to me completely excessive. 


The countryside around us is beautiful. Green hills, content cows, lots of early morning mist. The traffic is light and there is little of the city angst. But it's still a ridiculous amount of time trapped in a deadly metal(ish) box. As a kid, I just didn't go in cars. 


Neither of my parents drove until I was about nine - we lived in the inner suburbs and public transport was our friend. One of my earliest memories is of walking home from something in the city - the museum maybe? my short pudgy legs running to keep up with my dad's long legs. I believe that time I was scooped up and put on his shoulders, to survey the world like a queen from my high perch, but anything under an hour was seen as a good walk. Other memories are of returning through the botanical gardens in evening light, tired but happy, looking forward to watching a cartoon show with a minstrel anmaybe a fox and some fairytales.

If somewhere was too far to walk we trammed or trained it and my dad would scoff at those poor deluded fools (there were some, even then) who would get in the car to hop up to the corner shops or - far more hilarious, the gym. My beloved has, in fact, done this. More than once. I might even have done this. When it was raining.

But, using the excuse of the kids, the distance, I have become far more lazy. It has become a habit to just 'hop in the car' to make an hours gentle stroll a five minute car trip.


My Beloved's one demand for our next house is national broadband (he's still in deep, deep mourning from the election, and spends hours looking up precisely which houses managed to get fibre) mine is that everywhere is within walking distance. Schools, kindy, shops, train station, all within a half hour walk.


It doesn't seem such a big demand, and yet increasingly suburbs are not planned out for pedestrians, corner stores are disappearing, and we are becoming more car dependant, less likely to do the fifteen minute walk at either end of the train or bus. It's just easier. Quicker. A time saver. We walk less so we can go to the gym? Work out? 

Habits are hard to break, (oddly, thirty years of walking wherever I could crumbled in the five years post kids) but to get my kids to enjoy the rain on their face, the sudden surprises of flora and fauna, I think the effort could be worth it. 



Saturday, August 23, 2014

34/52





- littlest
-poppet
-sprocket

We have had glorious weather recently - sunny & blue skied & mild, with the air all scented with blossoms & jonquil. The hills around have been outstandingly beautiful & I've sighed & smiled & said how can we ever leave. We've tried to be out in it as much as possible. Spring is so close we can taste it.

Joining with Jodi for a portrait of my little ones every most weeks in 2014.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Letter to Littlest - three months old


Littlest,

Sweet-heart, you're three months old today and we spend our days in awe and delight with you. *

You are giggly, smiley, cuddly and very strong. (Who's mama's gorgeous, giggly, gurgly, gummy girl? Littlest is!)

All day your big eyes follow me as we go about our day and we chat and laugh with each other. You catch my eye and your face dissolves into big and joyous grins.

You hate tummy time, but you love to be stood up. Or sat up. Or basically just be UP. I fear you will be away and walking before I have time to catch my breath.

All this week you have had your little fist desperately in your mouth and been gnawing away as your first teeth come through. I have tried to tell you that you are too young for teething, but you haven't listened.

You've already rolled over - flipping from your tummy when I've tried to give you tummy time.  I would swear you've said 'mama' and 'hello' although your daddy laughs at me.

Do slow down little one, I want to savour this time and it's disappearing O so fast.

It's almost impossible to believe that this time last year you were only just coming into being. Hardly visible as you began your miraculous journey into the world. You are now so very much here and so very much yourself. You are placidly accepting as your brother and sister pick you up, cuddle you, sing to you, drop kisses on you, decide you want help rolling after they have been rolling in the grass - and obviously you want to as well.

You are already showing an interest in food, studying people intently as they eat, and reaching for a sausage with great determination and even greater lack of co-ordination. I suspect keeping you off solids until you are six months will be hard. With Sprocket and Poppet we managed five and a half months - with you I think five months might be a stretch. Just think, Little one, only a couple of months before you  too will know the delights of steamed veggies!

You are the first of our little ones to show any interest in television before eighteen months. If you are in a room and the television, or a computer, is on, you crane your head around, trying to catch a glimpse. I suspect (guiltily) that you became used to seeing the glow of the laptop through my tummy when you were in utero. Your daddy choses to think this means you will be technologically driven and maybe you will be the one he can teach computer languages too...

We are still playing 'guess what Littlest will look like.' It has been decided that while your brother is a mini-daddy, your sister a ringer for your aunty bec (and nana budgie) you are my little mini-me. We think your hair is coming in dark (we still hope for at least traces of red and you do have ginger eyebrows) and we suspect your eyes will be blue.

Your daddy is finally getting to know you. He has changed rotations - is in the hospital on the opposite side of us to the last, busily practicing his catheters, cannulas and bowel dis-impactions for next year when he's actually officially working (I'm not entirely sure what you call this year of 8-14 hour days, doing cannulas, catheters and bowel dis-impactions... play?) He is loving getting time to spend with you (unable to leave his student self behind he tried to place you in developmental guidelines but you are leaving them all behind.)

You are a solid little feeder, and your happy grunts and lunges for the milk make me laugh. Your little sigh/grunt as you latch on is hilarious.

When you wake in the morning you gurgle and chat with increasing urgency until your daddy and I come over to pick you up - playing with your hands or desperately sucking on them. When we come over you give us the biggest smile and reach up your arms.

You love being outside - sitting in your bouncr, watching the washing on the line and the changing shadows of the trees. You watch wistfully as the kids go on the trampoline and love when your daddy takes you up. Walks in your pusher are a hit, and you try out your winning smiles and grins on all passers by.

Traffic lights are a curse - you still fall asleep in the car almost the instant the engine starts, but should we happen to stop you wake and start howling. Luckily, there aren't many traffic lights around here!

Little darling one - our sweet little Lilli-Pilli you are our constant delight…and I'm going to use the excuse of your month-a-versary for an excess of photos…





 -one of your favourite places - perfectly positioned to supervise the hanging-of-the-washing and the big kids jumping on the trampoline. Don't worry, you'll be up there with them all too soon!


*This is now a couple of weeks late… next month I'll be on time. Maybe. 

Saturday, August 16, 2014

33/52





- my Poppet, running in late afternoon light. You can see some of the scratches on her face where Kik-Kak protested her excessive love. She instantly forgives him. I… do not. She asked for her hair to be cut short like her cousins this week and I'm loving the flapper bob. We've nearly, but not quite, got rid of the evidence of her time-alone-with-the-scissors.

-Littlest. Uncharacteristically solemn. She so wants to be up and playing with the big kids. She has been giggling this week and it's the most gorgeous sound.

-my Sprocket, climbing in the playground the afternoon before we went to the hospital to get his grommets put in again* and the unexpected removal of his adenoids. He is also displaying the results of Kik-Kaks protestations.

Joining with Jodi for a portrait of my kids once a week most weeks in 2014.



*just before that someone told us how they'd had grommets put in nine times. And we know the studies show that the long term benefits of grommets aren't great - but it's so hard for Sprocket just not being able to hear, that we'll settle for short term benefits. 

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Hello Queensland, here we come. We're moving North...


Blow the trumpets and bang the drum - The Phone of Destiny has finally rung and we'll be moving to Queensland in January! 

Woo-hoo and hallelujah!

For the past few weeks my Beloved's phone has been constantly at hand as we awaited The Phone Call.Whether pulling down a shed or inserting a cannula my Beloved has been on constant alert.* 

Of course, it was the day we decided that we wouldn't be hearing for another few weeks that The Phone of Destiny finally rang.My Beloved - the med-student, soon to be ex-med-student# -  will start his internship in his hometown in Queensland.

We have had all our fingers and toes crossed for this and have been hoping like mad. Much as I appreciate the green rolling hills of Gippsland and the beauty of the changing seasons down here, these four years have been a brutal and often lonely slog and we're both desperate to be close to family and friends.

My head is a mess of schools and kindies to enrol in, packing up the house, removalists and storage. We'll be staying with my Beloved's folks for a bit until we find a house so we don't have to worry about that, but I am making lists of all the lists I need to write up.

We're fizzy with excitement. 

My Beloved wants to return to his folk and I am looking forward to having a 'village' again. Living so close to my Beloved's sister again is cause for fireworks and champagne just by itself. 

Apart from that, the four years we've been here is double the length of time I've stayed in any other place since I left high school and my feet are itching for a change.

We're looking forward to weekends spent fishing with friends in balmy waters and weekly friday nights wine and cheese with all the family. While it's true that I'm essentially a cold-weather person, and I think temperatures involving sock-wearing are most spurring to my creativity, I spent so much of my twenties on various pacific islands the Pacific Ocean slipped into my blood. I'm frangipani dreaming now.

Queensland folk - prepare yourself - we're coming your way!

#Touch wood. We only have two more rotations to go, so we're hopeful he'll pass
*Med admin people are a strange breed. Last year when internships were being offered top students missed out on their first preference hospitals because they were in theatre attending operations when their phone rang and they couldn't scrub out in time to answer. Queensland health have a policy of phoning potential interns once, and if they don't answer, going on to the next student on the list. This made us nervous. 
Let the celebrations begin - we're going home!

Sunday, August 10, 2014

moments: wintry with signs of spring











- a lily in the kitchen one very cold winters morning. all the windows were covered with condensation on the inside and ice on the outside. a bucket of water in the garden was topped in ice, washing on the line was coated in ice, and on the way to school fields were whitened with/frost snow. It was all very beautiful and exciting - a true winter wonderland, and the kids and I explored and exclaimed in great delight on the way to school.
-the first blossom. my jonquils are also coming out too now. spring is definitely on the way.
-quince blossom. this has been out for awhile, but for some reason I don't count it. it almost seems a winter flower it comes out so early.
-rolling hills of Jindivick.
-Poppet, just sitting up after rolling.
-Poppet thought Littlest should roll too. Littlest is not uncharacteristically cautious.
-a convention of sheep, curious about the rolling children.
-Littlest and me one wintry afternoon in the garden. that little fist has been rather desperately chewed on these past two weeks.

Joining with Em for wintry-almost-spring moments from our week. This has been an incredibly exciting week for us - full of wonderful news, but more of that anon… My beloved wants me to wait till it's all official before I make the big announcement...

Saturday, August 9, 2014

32/52





 -Littlest, with her God-mama in a little cafe in Jindivick. I believe she's thinking she could get used to the cafe life. She continues growing far, far too quickly! (And look at da big eyes on de leedle darling… seriously, it's impossible to look at her without giving her a smooch - such a little cuddle-up-agus.)
-Poppet, running outside.
-Sprocket, rolling down the slope.

Last weekend we met up with a friend at the beautiful little village of Jindivick in West Gippsland. It is a ridiculously beautiful place with perfect, vivid green hills and a great selection of little cafes and restaurants. I might have squealed when I saw snow on the distant mountains. Snow! We saw snow! After a freezing morning the sky was high and blue and little birds chirped. The kids ran and rolled and played outside and my beloved and I enjoyed an (almost) civilised coffee with friends while we tag-teamed supervising the running and rolling. Bliss.

Joining with Jodi for a portrait of my kid every most some weeks in 2014.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Big, bad, bold, black, beastie.




I think I let the alliteration run away on me with the title, but I couldn't resist it.

We had a cat adopt us recently. A tough, in-your-face and under-your-feet and on-your-kitchen-benches type of cat.

The first warning that a life with cats was about to descend occurred on the morning I was in labour with Littlest. As I pottered through the house in the pre-dawn, electric with excitement and promise, I heard a mewling outside the kitchen window.

Eventually deciding the plaintive noise was a cat, I went outside and put out a tin of tuna. Eventually, a shy tabby appeared, ate and quickly fled.

That wasn't the cat that adopted us.

My first memories of the cat that adopted us are of driving up the drive with my newborn, and a big black cat trying to leap into the car as I unbuckled my baby, and then trying to trip me up as I carried my little one into the house.

The cat is large, and black, with a white bib and a splash of white across it's nose. We still haven't worked out the gender.

My Sprocket adores it. It is probably the only cat in the world tough enough (or desperate enough) to put up with his rough-love. The first thing he does every morning when he wakes is stagger to the front door to let the cat in. (Although it is often already sitting on his daddy's lap in the back room as his daddy studies.)

My introduction to the cat did not improve. Cleaning up diarrhoea it spread through the kitchen, up the hall into the living room and onto the couch did not endear me to it. Especially when half-way through the cleaning process my Sprocket brought me my crying two week old. My hands full of clean-up stuff there wasn't a lot I could do but ask him to put Littlest back. Now. Carefully.

Then there were the scratches and bites on my Poppet's face. Despite the scratches my Poppet doesn't learn. I think she's too used to the Sprocket's rough ways. Despite her face being a mess of red lines she keeps carting the cat around. And any cat would scratch considering the treatment. But a sensible cat would vamoose until the kids were old enough to understand the concept 'gentle hands.' We do keep explaining cats need to be held gently. And the best way to hold a cat is to sit still until they come to you. And you need to hold them this way. Not like that.

But no. The cat stayed. To be lavished with not-so-gentle-attention and scratch my little girl. She still has a tooth mark on her forehead, as well as the multitude of scratches. But hers is a forgiving nature. Although she comes to me crying one minute, the next all is forgotten.

We eventually worked out that the Black Beastie (or Kik-Kak as my sprocket named it. No. Not Kit-Kat, Kik-Kak) belongs to a guy across the road we think is a truck driver as the man is gone half the week and was once seen in the cab of a truck. At first we thought Kik-Kak belonged to a neighbour as we heard him kicking Kik-Kak out of his house and thought him very cruel.

Until it was our kitchen Kik-Cak was invading and our thighs Kik-Cak was leaping up on as he tried to roll us for our carrot stick. (No joke.)

Visitors love Kik-Cak. They forgive his piratical look as he immediately jumps in their lap, settles in and begins to purr. My children are obsessed.

He reminds my beloved of a particularly ill tempered cat he grew up with, chosen as a kitten as he was the one with his paws covering all the food and hissing at the other kittens.

I feel like a scrooge as I demand That Cat be kept away from Littlest. Maybe I'm just too busy at present to make room in my affections for another demanding little one?

Because the thing is, I am not usually anti-cat. In fact, I once brought home a cat from Tonga at vast expense and inconvenience, because he was irresistible. I was given Rosie as a kitten and for the first three nights he hissed and spat, and the third night he hoped up on my bed and slept the night under my chin and purred. Rosie was beautiful. Don't ask about the name.

Or Su-Su. Su-su was the daintiest, most beautiful cat to walk this earth. She had one luminous green eye and one luminous blue eye and gentle white paws and the most exquisite manners and grace.

Pussy, a big orange tom who turned up in our garden when I was a kid in the inner city and Ella Lucy Tiger Flower, a little black and white cat with a splash of ginger who turned up in our house when we moved to the outer suburbs, were both cats of personality and manners.

Lion, my parents cat, is a ginger cat of sense, who flees the house as soon as my kids arrive and returns the moment the kids are out the door.

In a children's story I love called The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy, written about two children in Hungary during the first world war, there is a story about a cat.

The children are sent to fetch their grandparents who are too close to the line of fire and at their grandparents house, amidst the devastation and the sound of fighting, the girl sees a stray cat and takes it in. The grandmother complains that it is no time to be thinking about a cat but the girl hides it away. On the trip back the cat becomes sick and the girl insists on taking it to a military hospital and having it seen by a doctor… which is where the long lost dad of the boy is found and retrieved from his amnesia by the little girl's famed scream at seeing him. (I'm not saying it's a particularly credible story, but as a kid it always made me cry.) The cat proceeds to have kittens, all of which are in high demand by kids wanting their own daddies found.

And every so often I think I really should find room in my heart for this most demanding, in-your-face- cat. Particularly as s/he appears disabled - being, by all appearances, unable to smell. (What kind of cat sticks their claws into your thigh for an apple? Or a carrot stick. And throwing it a scrap of chicken it chased the direction of the movement, but a foot from the chicken couldn't smell it.)

Is it ones duty to love cats that just turn up? I'm still working on it. Maybe when life is not such a hurry of school runs and nappies and children suffering melt-downs with middle-child-syndrome.

Maybe. In the meantime the cat is well fed (my beloved), well loved (the kids.) And I content myself with fleaing and worming it, and wondering about the ethics of taking someone else's cat to the vet. Just to check it's not with kitten.





Sunday, August 3, 2014

moments - cousins by sea













- my sprocket, eating toast in the morning, down at the beach house
- cousin, coming through from the neighbour's garden
-my poppet, telling us all about it
-my poppet, running on the shore
-a fence in the dunes
-jellyfish slither. my brothers and I spent ages playing with the blobs of clear jellyfish washed up on the shore (I remember hiding it under pillows, oops) and now my kids are doing the same.
-three cousins busily building on the beach. they ran down the winding path to the beach and had stripped off and were playing along the shore by the time I reached them, meandering down at a slower pace with Littlest. Luckily, my brother could keep up with them!
-Littlest, on her Grandpa's lap, after her christening - characteristically laid back and surveying the world
-surfer in silvered sea
-the cousins, running home from the sea. As is becoming traditional, Sprocket is wearing my cardie. I want to retake this photo when they are all teenagers… but I suspect Sprocket will no longer fit my cardigans.

We had a beautiful weekend down by the sea last week, returning to the surf coast for Littlest's Christening. It was just what we needed - a taste of magic - although the drive was long. The kids loved running along the shore and I loved being home and having family all around, seeing their joy.

My kids are not indoors kids. My Sprocket climbs the walls (and I mean that literally) while my Poppet follows in his lead in wildness.  But give them sea and sand and rocks and they will play happily for hours.

Joining with Em for moments from our week. 

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Littlest's Christening



My Little, Littlest one,

We took you across the state, down to the sea and shore, for your Christening last weekend.
Your family gathered to promise to support and guide you, coming by plane and train and car to be with you. You spent the weekend being passed from welcoming arm to welcoming arm, as we all tried to be good about sharing you. You were - as usual - exceptionally easy-going, happy to give big joyful grins to all, as long as the milk supply was good.

We arrived in the house after our long drive on Friday night, and your Godmama was waiting, so the house was lit up and welcoming as we pulled up the orange clay drive. The sound of the sea was soft that night, but the air was crisp and fresh and I told you that you were home. This is the place that we always return to.

The next morning we took you down to the beach. You loved wandering along the shore in your hug-a-bug, while your brother and sister ran wild along the tide line. You're an outdoor, moving type of girl. You want to be always under the sky and on the go.

Your Nana and Grandpa and Aunty arrived from Queensland and the festivities began. In the afternoon we went into town - your aunty and Godmama and I checked out the op-shop (hello cute little knitted romper and gorgeous velvet top) and then we came home to bake - me your Christening cake and your Godmama your sister's birthday cake.

The great open fireplace was filled with wood (I love to see a man with an axe!) the bottles of wine opened, and cheeses and meats brought out. (For someone who was a vegetation for fifteen years my childbearing years have brought rather embarrassing meat cravings!)

You sat on your grandpa's belly in front of the fire and calmly surveyed all, before being nursed to sleep and put in the bassinet my brothers and I slept in as babies.

The following morning all was activity - your daddy and I iced and decorated your cake, your wonderful Godmama your sister's birthday cake, your sister collected flowers for it, your daddy ran your brother down on the beach, to try to get rid of excess energy, and we all tidied up from the night before and got dressed for the service. You and I were the very last to change and it was so much fun dressing you in your little petticoat and silk slippers.

We tumbled into cars, the christening cake on my lap and drove along the Great Ocean Road to the small church - the same one your brother and sister were christened in - the same beautiful parish your daddy and I were married in - and made our promises to you.

Your sister couldn't resist dancing in the aisle during the service (I had my ballet slippers on, I had to dance!) and later playing with a wind up car. When her cousin arrived she ran across the front of the church and they threw their arms around each other with joy. Your brother and sister and cousin all got to come up and splash you with the water from the font.

As we left, the organist played a piece that your great grandfather had loved - he often used to take services there, particularly at Easter - and that she remembered him asking for the music for.

Returning home there was somehow plenty of food - even though I had put next to no thought into it - it all just appeared - your Godmamma had made a gorgeous pumpkin soup the night before, your nana and grandpa brought down a free range ham and oatcakes, and there were still lashings of cheeses, meats and fruits from the night before that your other nana had bought.

As with your brothers and sisters, after lunch we wandered down to the shore and you fell asleep to the sound of the sea.










Friday, August 1, 2014

31/52





- my Poppet, in her princess dress, down by the beach. So hard to believe she's nearly four. My bold, brave extravaganza.
-my Sprocket, early morning on the verandah down at the beach house. A little out of focus but I love the colours and his expression. My little-big boy.
- my Littlest, already over the camera, on the beach her daddy proposed on. She is growing so quickly I blink and miss something. I so wish I could pause and rewind. If every minute was an hour and every day a week I would be very grateful.

I've missed a lot of weeks with the 52 project, but now things are (sort of!) back on track, we're (sort of) getting back into routine I want to try to start documenting the weeks again. They are all growing so very very fast. Once again joining with Jodi for a portrait of my kids once a week, every most weeks in 2014.