From Baby to Boy With A Bang

I was doing dishes while Mr napped.  Suddenly I heard Him singing.  I smiled.  He does that all the time, just wakes up and entertains Himself with His own personalized soundtrack for awhile before calling me to get Him up.  But then I stopped smiling and got a dumb confused look on instead.  Because why did He sound so close?  And getting closer?
I stepped out into the living room, and there He was.

C: "Mister! How did you get out of your crib? You're supposed to be napping!" 

Mr: "Well now, Mommy. I counted, a 10. 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, and count a 1-2-3. And that's a long TIME, a long of SECONDS, and is ENOUGH napping, and well, Mommy. I just a busy guy. Got some trucks here."

And just like that he went off to make a train out of trucks.  
I knew it was the end of an era, but I didn't realize how serious it was.  
Because that night, I put Him in bed like always, and like always He pulled the blankets up to His chin, rolled over onto His side, and went to sleep.  Maybe it was a one time thing.
But later, the peace of the morning was shattered, sort of literally, by the sound of a huge crash, something glass smashing, and then, after the briefest vacuum of silence (all parents know the terror of this moment), the hysterical screaming of my son.  
Peanuts you can believe I was on my feet and across the house before my brain had even fully registered those sounds.  
There are moments (many while driving in DC traffic) in which I have to believe in guardian angels, because nothing else can explain the miraculous escape from injury.  This was totally one of those times.  
Little Mister rose from the midst of epic wreckage like a giant at the end of a good smiting.  There were broken shards of green, a storm of pennies and quarters, and scattered random keys and little things.  Oh.  And an iPad.  
Mister had awakened first, let Himself out of bed, and wandered out of His room to spy an iPad sitting on the high shelf over our entry table.  It was up there, of course, to be out of sight, out of mind, out of reach.
He pushed a big chair over to the table, climbed up, and must have stood on His very tip-toes on that narrow table to reeeeaaaaaach for His prize.  Something went wrong there, because the iPad, the shelf, the Boy, and the big ceramic dish full of change all took a big leap into the arms of gravity and hit the linoleum by the front door.  Pennies for miles.  Pennies for days.  Pennies in places we didn't know we could find pennies. 
And that dish.  J and I got that dish in a small village outside Budapest, on one of the best trips we've ever had.  I kept it over the doorway so I could see it throughout the day.  It reminded me of a beautiful, peaceful place, and a time when J and I were so happy there was actual bliss going on, guys.   It was our first trip as parents on our own, such a wonderful adventure we promised ourselves we'd do one every year.  
Well, we modified that promise due to Life.  But the dish stayed the same, and was a special piece of proof that the whole dream really happened.  Also, it was really pretty.  
Still, as I looked at the splinters of it while folding my crying son into my lap, all I could be was thankful that the dish got broken, and not Little Mister.  He somehow emerged without a scratch or bruise.  
Somethings can't be replaced, like intrepid little boys who try to steal illicit material while their parents are sleeping.  
I can't exactly replace that hand-thrown dish either.  But as I swept up the pieces, I called to mind all the memories of our trip and tried to tuck them into my mind somewhere they won't get lost.  The memories don't mean less because their icon is gone.  Honestly, I would have kept that dish.  It would have been one of the things that would be too hard not to keep.  But life and Mister did it for me.  Thanks for the assist guys!
As for that Mister, He won the freedom of His Big Boy Bed.  Sometimes He wakes up ready for action in the wee hours and terrorizes us by jumping on our heads or pitter-pattering up and down the hall at 3am. But for the most part, He just sleeps. Like the big two-year old boy He is, somehow and all the sudden.  
So. I had this pretty Hungarian ceramic.  I had this little baby, this last little baby, sleeping in a crib.  
I let them go.  

Let It Go

Bet you thought this was going to be some Disney Frozen thing, huh?
Well with three kids under 8, that's a safe bet.  But nope.  Although I do like warm hugs.
In my effort to (literally and figuratively) lighten loads around here, I've made a pact with J to take very little with us to Japan.  No furniture.  No knick-knacky stuff.  No "for fancy times" or "holiday times" or "in case we ever need it times" stuff.  I have no idea whether we can pull off a minimalist lifestyle with 3 little kids and my strong subconscious impulse to save everything and get attached to everything and get things at the thrift store for no other reason that it was 50 cents and a nice shade of blue.  But we can try, right? Moving to a place where some people live in houses the size of a typical American linen closet seems like a great impetus to give it a go.
I love my kids' childhoods so much; I love to look at tiny outfit or a little toy and remember each of my Littles at an even littler age, when they were so teensy and wearing this or playing with that.
But even if we did one day add another little to the mix, after raising three (plus bananas) for a while now, we know this secret.  It's a secret that the baby-shower-planners and registries don't like to share, but it's a truth.  Which is that, really, you hardly need any stuff to have a baby.  Some diapers and bottles and a handful of outfits, all of which will get stained by some lord-knows-what anyways.
We could probably scrounge that much up if we ever needed to.
The point being, I don't need to save ALL of the cute things my kids have ever touched.  Some things are harder to let go than others, of course.  The outfits they barely wore before growing out of them and the toys that make REALLY LOUD REPETITIVE NOISES, for instance, are much easier to say goodbye to than the first Christmas dress or the chair I rocked them all to sleep in.  So I started with the easy stuff.  Baby steps, we might say.
I took loads of stuff to a consignment sale last month, and am happy that a whole bunch of toys and games will be traveling soon to the new AFC community center in Ethiopia. We've been arbitrarily passing stuff out to friends.  Oh, you like that rocking horse?  Great.  Take it home!
It's true I started out gently, but so far it has been a relief to send things off to a new home.  We appreciated all that kid stuff when we needed it and used it, but it should be appreciated again by someone else who isn't too big for it.  So, I packed it off and it felt like a first step on a new journey.  A step closer to Japan, to a new life, to a new kind of living, maybe.  We used to have all that outgrown kid stuff sitting our my basement.  But we let it go.

Letting Go

People can't grow wings.
We look the same as we age, just maybe a little softer around the edges, maybe we fade a bit.
But that's just the outside, though.  The most substantial part of people is the inside stuff.  All kinds of things can happen in the soul parts.
For me, the year I turned 21 was a moment in time I look back on as a chrysalis in my life.  I was pretty colorful before that I think- a topic for other days- but that was the year I stopped crawling around as usual, took stock of my surroundings, the season, and the direction of the wind, sunk into myself awhile, and emerged at the end of the year an altogether different creature.
It was the year I grew my inside wings.
That was the year I learned to Take Things On.  It was the year I became suddenly aware, like a new butterfly finally rising above it's old leaf to see the wide horizons, of the wider world around me and my little place in it. The year I figured out what mattered to me, and what kind of me I wanted to become, the year I Grew Up.
I found that I had strength; not just one kind, but many, and that I could Do Things. I could take steps and get to where I wanted to go, all on my own.  That year I felt that the world and life were huge and limitless, and so was I.  The year I turned 21 I broke out of the cocoon and took off into life knowing that I Can.
Since then, in my own small way, I have made a point of flying towards the things that matter most to me, and while I have made mistakes sometimes, and sacrificed some things for others, I have tried to lean into the wind, to take opportunities before they pass by, to do my best, operating under the assumption that I Can.
A decade later, it's been another defining year for me.  That last year, we lost six close family members, and our dog.  We had some major unexpected financial blows.  I became a working mom- and a full-time, at-home mom- at the same time, and J took on the dreaded Residency. We were far from family during the year we wished most to be near them for so many reasons. Still settling in from our last move, we learned we are moving this summer to Japan- both a great adventure and a major change. I had a year of health problems including a sudden unplanned surgery right at the most demanding time of year at my job, and the Littles needed us more as there was less of us to go around.
I kept leaning into that wind, repeating at my desk at four in the morning "I Can", repeating as I raced from PTA meetings to phone conferences to the grocery store "I Can", repeating as I tried to entertain Mister during a 3 hour bank meeting followed by medical appointments and cooking dinner while J was working a 90 hour week, "I Can. I Can".   I was still calling out instructions for volunteers and reminding J about piano lessons literally as I was wheeled into surgery.  I spent the day I was released from the hospital framing artwork with a team of people in my basement, and twice ripped open my stitches carrying Mister as I hurried from here to there because "I Can" had become "I Must".
I woke up in 2016 and it had been a really long time since I'd written a blog post or put a photo in an album and I wanted to say something to commemorate the year.  But looking back, being real and honest... I would say that if I'll always remember 21 as the year I found myself, I think I will always remember 33 as the year I found my limits.
This was the year I realized I even had limits.  I've learned that I can only "I Can" until.... I can't.
So this was also the year that I learned to accept help.  And, ok, to beg for it sometimes.  I learned to lower my expectations (so. much. lower.) It has been the year I learned how to say "no thanks".  Even when I wanted to say "yes".
I  have learned that I can ignore my limitations, or I can glare at them, hating them, and there they still are. So instead of continuing to beat my wings against the glass, I am trying to take stock of my surroundings, the season, and the direction of the wind.  Sink into myself for awhile.  I'm not exactly sure what I will be when I come out on the other side- I'm still metamorphosing over here.
But after reviewing that last year, and looking ahead to the next one, I keep getting the feeling that whatever the answers are, they have something to do with Letting Things Go.  To not have quite so much to carry.
Maybe I'll come out on the other side of this Defining Time with more streamlined wings- or without any.  Maybe there will be something even better. Who knows?
If I have to grow older and stay boringly similar on the outside, at least on the inside, I can keep changing, evolving, growing...or ungrowing and getting simpler, lighter instead.
I guess it's part of the transformation that I used to never want to say openly "this is hard".  But in the last two years, I have, because I had to- it was the truth.  I definitely needed not to say "This is TOO hard", because that's a slippery slope into words I needed not to think, much less say outright.  "I Can't".  So sometimes I just didn't say anything at all.  But you know.  Sometimes I Can't.  Sometimes I just Can't.  So I think I will start this new stage in life, whatever it may be, with getting a little lighter:
I used to have this need to I Can all the time.  I let it go.