10pm and finally, FINALLY, both girls are in bed and asleep.  The dishes and laundry await.  Today was a long day, yesterday was long too, but cumulatively they blur by fast and faster.  Claire is starting to look me in the eyes and gurgle a long, convoluted story about her dreams when she wakes up in the morning, and her scrawny little newborn legs and arms have filled out into dimpled dumplings.  Suddenly Beatrice is a Big Girl with bony elbows and a heavy body that is getting hard to carry up the stairs.  And I look at these two innocent, bright eyed girls and I think about the future, about wars and climate change and vaccine ingredients and swine flu and the end of the mayan calendar and I want to just stay right here forever.

Her Bad Mother got it right when she said

This is a truth about being a parent that nothing and no-one can prepare you for: that it is a continual experience of loss, a never-ending stream of moments of goodbye. That from the moment your children come into your life you are losing them. That the person your child is today is a person you will never meet again, a person that you will, in some ways, forget, as he or she is replaced by new people, bigger people, faster people, people with more words, people with more independence, people whose primary purpose is to move continually away from you.

And it’s definitely more bittersweet the second time round.

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family, journaling, self-analysis by michelle