You're the Best Song

I love the written word. I love the way that words sound when they roll of the tongue and the distinct smell of a book. I love dog-earing, underlining, and getting lost in a story. I just love everything about the experience of reading and writing. 

I was the girl that spent Saturdays snuggled up on the couch with a good book devouring page after page. And I always packed a book in my suitcase when I spent the night with a friend, just incase I woke up before them. I always did.

 I journaled my way through my adolescence. I cringe when I read some of the things that I wrote about, but it was a more than acceptable outlet for expressing my teenage emotions.

And now I blog and continue to journal - only now it's mostly about my babies. I knowingly overuse parentheses and misuse commas, but I don't care about any of that. I'm just writing for me. James may not care that he mastered the skill of buttoning on September 29, 2013 one day and Jude may be completely indifferent to learn that he rolled over on September 14, but it will always matter to me. They are the culmination of all the small things that made up the years spent with them. I want to remember every step of this journey. I write to express how profoundly this gift of motherhood has impacted me and changed me, and yet there never seem to be words quite adequate enough to covey how much it means to me and they mean to me.

One year ago today we found out that we were expecting our sweet Jude, and I remember wondering, as I held our firstborn in a field of pumpkins, what life would be like one year later. And now exactly 365 days later, it's just all the more wonderful. My hands are full. My days are full. My heart is full. There's nothing that will ever mean more to me.

October 2010:

October 2011:

October 2012:

October 1, 2013:

I'll never write a song for them. At least not one that would ever be recorded or heard outside the four walls of our little home. (I have actually written quite a few early morning lullabies while we rocked.)

But if I ever did or could, they would be my very best song: