Supersaturated New Year

The way Christmas should be celebrated, photo by PapaRazi

2007 was a slow year. Sadness and fear spattered with hope have a way of drawing out time. It was our newlywed year, the year we decided to start a family. I took our first loss as a sign that it was time to reevaluate where we wanted to live and make the cross country move we had always imagined. 2007 was a year of drastic changes, always looking forward as we trudged through it all.



Cue 2008, the last of the Slow Years. A year goes by so fast when you have a purpose in your life and it's amazing so many memories can exist in one time-space. Once Bella was born we were simply trying not to get whiplash from looking back as we struggled to catch up with the new pace. And the last couple of months went by at breakneck speed. It's like 2008 saw the New Year coming and was like, Oh Thank God, and started to run to pass off the relay wand.

Everything else from here on out will fly past our eyes and it will be my mission to savor it as much as possible.



I had an inkling, or perhaps mild dread, about how quickly life moves when children are involved, but I didn't know that it would go from five miles per hour to 50 over night. It's nice to have endless photographs to be able to freeze a moment and say, Yes, I remember that, but they really put things in perspective. No more scrolling through photos trying to look for the subtle clues deciphering which Christmas, which party, which season, which year we are reminiscing. Even photos without Bella still shout She's Here! A toy in the corner (or littering the floor), extra bags under my eyes (and coffee in my hand), that look that says Mama all over me (forgot to brush hair again). She's our little hourglass, each day another grain topping off the pile, another inaccessible moment added to our long list of memories.



After a wash of (joyfully generic) Christmas after Christmas, this will be the only one Just Like It, everyone together, one little baby happily soaking it all up. I can't fathom having a toddler running around next Christmas, I don't even try. On New Year's Day we waited for a table in a restaurant lobby with piles and piles of families. My mom asked a fellow mother how old her baby was, and then corrected the phrase since the girl was so much bigger than Bella, technically a toddler. To me she looked ten feet long and ready to start school. Twenty months, the mother replied. And I noticed it, that phrasing, a mother clinging to those last few months before resigning to years for age descriptions.

Twenty months. Exactly the age Isabelle will be this time next year, when I will be calling her by months, hoping that everyone still remembers she's just a baby. Once a baby, always a baby.

2009 here we come.