I don’t always miss my kids being babies… but today I do and here’s why

I had three kids, each two years apart. At one point I had three kids, 5 years and under. When I think back on those times, I think that is the point where I slowly went insane. There are lots of reasons I don’t always look back on my kids’ baby days fondly. Here are just a few:

• Kids are selfish little beings. I’m selfish too but I have the burden of knowing right from wrong so when it came down to their wants or mine, they always won. I hate losing. 
• They are impatient and demanding. And the way they show this is through constant tears. Constant. Tears. 
• Changing the diapers on a two year old is the equivalent of changing the diapers on a hobo. 
• I got interrupted a lot. My thoughts were interrupted, my conversations, my meals. That’s annoying. 
• There was a solid 7 years where I fell out of touch with popular culture. I still have no idea what the fuss Lost and Grey’s Anatomy were about.  It’s a shame.

For me, having babies was crazy time. I wasn’t the mom who sat and stared at my babies and was just thankful to hold them. On the contrary, while I held them I thought about all the things I needed to get done. True confessions here, people. So I spent a lot of my time with babies, being annoyed.

But God makes allowances for us all and gave me the precious gift of a horrible memory. My close friends and family know this is 100% true. I am terrible about keeping commitments and showing up places on time, mostly because I just plum forget. However, I also am very forgiving and don’t keep a record of wrongs, mostly because I can’t remember them. My bad memory has been a joke in our family for a long time, but truth be told, I am pretty good at remembering negative things. I'm just not quite as good at remembering the good.

Because of this inability to store information in my brain, I started hoarding saving physical items I felt were connected to memories. It started when I moved out of my mom’s house and was on my own. I took my childhood toys and books with me and kept them in a room in my first house. When people came over, they assumed I had kids. Now those items are stored away in the attic. When I had my kids I wanted to save all those small moments in time I knew I would never remember so I started scrapbooking. Each of my kids have a book with letters I write to them on their birthdays and pictures from that year. Each of them has two scrapbooks that span their lives from birth to five years old. Then there are the family Christmas and vacation albums. My focus in these albums was not to have the best page layouts and most creative, artistic products. An experienced scrapbooker can see that I threw pictures into books and have very little skill in making things look nice. But what I did focus on was writing down the wonderful things happening in my family and the endearing things about my kids’ childhoods that I knew I would forget.

For someone with a negative outlook on life who is mostly always angry or annoyed, scrapbooking seemed to bring out the fun and happy side of me. I’m a perfectionist and, spoiler alert, life is rarely perfect… or is it? As I flipped through my kids’ albums this morning I saw adorable kids in swimming pools, laughing kids playing in the snow, a family taking their kids to Disney World. No one took pictures of all the different ADHD meds Lena has tried and how none of them have really helped. There is no record of the summer Ben freaked out and had major panic attacks over people supposedly watching and judging him. I have yet to take a single picture of Evy playing the ‘baby of the family’ card and pestering her siblings to get them in trouble, though it seems to happen daily. My marriage slowly falling apart while we had kids and tried to rebuild trust not knowing it would never happen… not on those pages. What IS on those pages are all the happy moments. All the funny things Lena has said because she has no filter on her brain. All the things Ben has excelled at because I may not be the only perfectionist in the house. I have an entire book full of our beloved baby of the family, Evy and how fun it is for her to be the youngest. I have pictures of two people trying to raise three kids and enjoy it.

Good grief. I have around 20 scrapbooks. That’s hundreds of pages of happy moments from a time in my life I also have an equal amount of terrible memories locked in my brain. How can it be that even in a time of my life where I was stressed and discouraged, I was also living some of my best days?

The past five years have been some of the hardest in my life, but also some of the most personally fulfilling. I think often about my failures and what I haven’t given my kids in the way of a happy family. But when I sit down and look at the photographs in their scrapbooks I realize what I gave them is a life worth living and that the good outweighs the bad. The sad thing is I haven’t documented any of the events of the past five years. I guess when I sit and think about it, it’s too sad. There is too much not going my way. There are too many hurt feelings, and hurt kids. I guess somewhere along the way I forgot, I don’t have to document the parts I don't like.I don't have to dwell on the parts that don't seem fair and make me sad. I can choose to focus on the positive and enjoy each moment every day that brings me joy.

Here's a picture of our family today! I am going to use this to start a new scrapbook. In real life two of the people in this picture hate each other, one wants to move out of our house, and there are two other people who are exhausted and not sure how to handle all these kids... but in our family scrapbook I shall write "Valentine's Day 2016" and I will put some cute heart stickers around it and in five years when the teens are moving out for reals we will look it and say "Remember that day? We ate Chinese food and went to the movies and everyone had fun." <3