Time....

It seems like it's trickling by and I am unable to slow it down. With so many things happening in my own life, school seems to encompass the majority of my time, I am having trouble to sit and watch my kids and to appreciate them on a daily basis. It doesn't seem like 4 years has passed since Jack made funny faces whenever the camera would point to him, today he tests for yellow belt in karate. It's something that he really wanted to do and opted to forgo soccer for. He has excelled, something which Jaesen and I had questioned due to his ADHD. Although we have always known his potential, even we were pleasantly surprised by how well he has taken to the repetition of this sport.
Tristan, little Mr. Serious, and it's hard to believe he is off to middle school next year (here he will attend a magnet school where it starts at 5th grade). This year he tackled the violin, along with soccer and was finally placed in gifted and talented for math and reading. His imagination stills run rampant, from Harry Potter to Star Wars, he is still just a little guy in a body that is slowly growing. He used to have his imaginary playmates, "the boys", that rode everywhere with us and hung out with him until Jack was big enough to join in the fun. The kid who could navigate through Tokyo station with the best Japanese businessman or climb Mt. Fuji to the top. His nonstop monologues on whatever interests him at the moment can be taxing on a person, but the amount of knowledge in that great big head of his is enormous, and he so wants to share it with everyone.

And then there is Bean, little miss Savannah. How can it be that over four years has passed since her birth? Is time really passing that quickly? I look at her and now she is not a toddler, or a baby, but a strong minded little girl. She can ice skate, battle the other girls in soccer and kick their butts (making her mother oh so proud!), wield a lightsaber with the brothers and write her name. It was just yesterday that the midwife surprised us by saying, it's a girl, when we thought Charlie was going to be born. Just a moment ago when her funny faces could make us all laugh, she waited to walk until her Daddy came home from Iraq, almost like she knew that he needed to be a part of that moment. It's like trying to hold sand in your hands in the ocean, the surge of the surf keeps dragging the sand away, time is moving on no matter how hard I try to slow it down. The best I can do is capture the moments one at a time and enjoy them in the moment.