Six Little Sleeps

Do I love my daughters?

Of course!!

Do I enjoy their cuteness and laughter and one-liners and creativity and giggles and beautiful naturally tanned brown skin in summer swimsuits and taking a few thousand pics of them and reading together and coloring together and watching movies together and eating popcorn and riding in the Jeep and.... list goes on???

Sure I do!

Did I long to be a mommy for years and years and years and lost so many tears over that deep longing for children to be in my care begging God for my own?

You better believe it!

Am I the kind of mom who gets all weepy and sad at the thought of her children going off to school leaving her alone through the school day?

Heck NO!!!!!!

I cannot wait until next Monday.

School starts. Fifth grade for PandaGirl, Kindergarten for PandaJoy.

Really and truly. I am beside myself with excitement as to how my life will open up to a whole new world. One that I haven't really known. I have been a stay at home mom since PandaGirl came along. She was with me the whole time. A few mother's day out jaunts then on to pre-school a couple of days a week, but I worked at the pre-school along with her in the same building for two years. Her Kindergarten year I worked full-time as a speech therapist in public school and got the taste of that kind of full-time working mom routine which gave me an appreciation for being a SAHM. Then I started being so focused on trying to get child number two through adoption that it was like a dang job. So really, come next Monday when both girls are in school from 7:45-2:45 I can actually discover me on a whole new level.

That excites me. 

I'm hoping my extra time will allow me to focus on the many things I need learn about my camera, my photography business and editing software along with a whole slew of other things I've been putting off while having a child underfoot for the past oh-so-many-years.

Though we are always on a tight budget (and blow the budget) with PandaPop being a children's minister I have been blessed to be a stay at home mom.

My dream.

Dreams tend to not work out in real life as fantastically as they appear in one's imagination, now do they?

I think all jobs are challenging at some level no matter what you do. Even scooping ice cream can be stressful. I know. I asked the 16 year old girl scooping up my fat-filled ice cream at Ben & Jerry's this summer if her arm hurts from all that scooping and she replied with a slight disgust in her tone how only her one arm was getting the scooping work-out.  So, there ya go. Any job can bring its own set of obstacles to the table. Who wants one arm muscle to be firm and the other flabby? No one.

Being a stay at home mom is challenging. Let's say it's hard. Not working-for-the-FBI hard or holding-a-scalpel-steady-in-someone's-brain hard or frontline-military-work hard but more like the old Chinese torture of dripping water on one's forehead in the same spot over and over until the person breaks kind of hard.

Unless you are the kind of mom who genuinely adores being around your kids day in day out all day then you understand exactly what I'm saying. I know I'm not alone due to the amount of fb posts with begs, vents and pleas for school to start so that life can go on without the slaying (pretend, of course) of all the little children in the homes of my friends.

Clearly we are not the first to be elated when school resumes as I recall Bing Crosby singing the whimsical lyrics to It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas with...

A pair of Hop along boots and a pistol that shoots

Is the wish of Barney and Ben

Dolls that will talk and will go for a walk

Is the hope of Janice and Jen

And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again

And that song has been around forever.

So as I have enjoyed many moments with my beautiful daughters and have bonded with them even more (quite important in our family of adoption) I must say that the thought of making it through the next six sleeps is invigorating. 

The pic above is me last night as I hopped in our Jeep with the doors off and top down, ear buds blaring away some tunes in my ears and wind blowing my ponytail all over creation and zoomed away to the store via the long scenic route. 

Alone.

Exhilarating.