oh, Life.

"I just want to sit and write," I said to my husband one night. I miss this writing thing. I miss it more than I thought I would. The baby is asleep - at least for now - the laundry is done, the dishes are...around the house, but what I want most is to sit and write. I want it so much that I just turned my phone on airplane mode so that I can sit and write. I used to need silence to write. Now writing comes with the sounds of my daughter's white noise machine playing through her monitor and my husband playing video games in the background. There's not a second of this life I would trade - not the endless laundry covered in various baby fluids, not the late nights, not the poopy diapers - for more writing time. There's not a second of this life I would trade for anything in the world, except maybe holiness. But the thing is that I'm getting holiness thrown in with this whole wife and mother gig, so I've got nothing to trade anyway. I started going back to work two weeks ago. I'm not going to lie, it is about a thousand times harder than I thought it would be. Before she was born I could easily say that I never really had a desire to be a stay at home mom. Even after she was born I was - to a degree - ready to get back to work and talk to people who could, unlike my daughter, converse with me. But then it happened, I went back. Even though my daughter comes with me to work (which is a huge blessing), its still hard. My heart is divided. I don't want to miss a second of her life. She was inside of me for nine months, so to be parted from her now feels like parting with part of myself. This motherhood thing is beautiful and glorious, messy and exhausting. She's teaching me patience up the wazoo - more patience than I ever, ever, ever had before she was born. I don't think I ever realized how tough I was until she was born. Not only did labor show me a new side of myself, but being a mother has, too. I can - and do - endure more than I thought possible before she was born. I'd love to sleep in, or even just sleep for a solid 6 hours, but I've learned that I can do without. I'd love to be able to do a myriad of things with both of my hands, but I've learned just how much I can do while holding (or wearing) her. Each day my heart grows bigger as I love both her and my husband more. Late night ramblings aside, I miss the blog. I'm still here, still around, though certainly not as consistently. I'm happy if I get a post a week up, and I'm increasingly aware that there may be weeks I go without. At the end of the day, I'm okay with that. I'd rather spend a few extra minutes snuggling my daughter than writing a new post. That's not to say that I don't love all of you or that I don't want to write, but my priorities are shifting and I like it that way. So if I go a few days (or weeks) without posting, know that I'm thinking and praying for all of you...and waiting for her nap time (and the laundry and dishes and other random things to be done) so that I can come back here to this place I've grown so fond of and write it all out. But first, I've got to live it up, to be present to my husband and my daughter. I've got to drink in each moment because as all parents know, it goes by all too fast.