Sand Through The Hourglass....

When people say kids grow up fast, they're not kidding! Seriously, time has never gone faster! I look back on videos of Zoya from the orphanage and the first few months home and its bittersweet. As I watched some of the videos last night (before the migraine of the year hit) I thought I can't even remember her being that way. I can't remember her learning to crawl and how clumsy and awkward she looked trying to scoot from one place to another. I remember in my head that she couldn't even crawl when we brought her home, but I forgot what she looked like when learning to crawl. I forgot how short she was and how her baby fat made her look so much younger. I forgot that her hair was so short in the back it was almost like a buzz cut. I forgot that her jammies that are now way too small on her used to be baggy at one time.  My memory has never been stellar but it makes me a little sad to think that her baby-ness seems so far away. Like one day she just became this toddler. And then I'm going to blink and she'll be in Kindergarten, and then in another instant she will have her first crush (on a guy other than her Daddy :), and, well, I just want to freeze time right here. I want her to be 2 years 7 months and 8 days old forever. O.K., really, truly, I don't want that...I want nothing more than to watch her blossom and grow into the child of God that she is....but darn it, it's sad sometimes thinking about how she's not really a baby anymore.

When we were preparing to bring Zoya home, we prepared for a baby...I'm talking a child around a 6 month developmental level. Well she far surpassed those expectations from day 1. So now I'm left feeling like I didn't get enough of her as a baby and wishing I could get those days back. I'd give anything. I'd give away everything I own and then some. But I can't, and I won't ever get those days back. And don't get me wrong, I'm over the moon happy knowing this was all God's plan, but sometimes, just sometimes, I'd like to know why God's plan involved my baby being alone for 22 months (now I know HE was there, but alone in the sense of human contact). But who am I to question God, really? I could list a million different "maybes" as to why we didn't "find' each other until then, but it's all speculation and maybe I'm never supposed to know. Maybe it is what it is and that's that.

How do you bottle up all the memories and save them forever when you have that suffocating feeling of sand slipping through the hourglass?  I take a million pictures and videos and I love looking back on them, but I feel like I wish I could savor every single second even more. Days pass by so fast and some days I'm just not ready to move onto the next. I'd rather bathe in their beauty and comfort. Some days I feel like I haven't sucked enough juice out of life.  But time moves on at the same pace day after day and we are the ones left hoping to feel that we've given it our all....hoping that the memories we make will last a lifetime...knowing that we can't hold on to each moment forever, but that we must take each moment one at a time, embrace and love on that moment completely, and then let it slip to the back of our hearts to embrace the beauty of the next moment, and the moment after that.  So I guess we let the sand slip through the hourglass, but only after we've held and completely savored each and every piece of sand. 

A Walk Down Memory Lane...

Oh, how far we've come since this video....my sweet baby!