Milestones

On the very first day of the New Year, he turns 18 months old.  Looking up at us, clear as a bell, our littlest man with very few words says it for the first time, clear as a bell.  "Dad."  The two of us beam and grin like anything, certain that we've never heard anything so brilliant in all our lives.  Another milestone marked in this little family, deeply wrapped in Winter.

I'm not great at milestones.  With so many little ones and so many things happening each day, I can't tell you when Dinah lost her first tooth, or precisely when Ben took off on a bike without training wheels.  I wouldn't have realized that I am currently beginning my 3rd trimester with baby #6 if someone else hadn't mentioned it to me.  Life, as they say, has a way of getting in the way of exact dates and times in my mind.  I'm too busy living it to remember it.

With another big milestone right around the corner, 10 years (10!  A whole decade?!  It hardly seems possible) of marriage on the eighteenth, I am thinking quite a bit over the last 10 years and the amazing life we've been given.  Even if I can't recall exact dates and times of everything, this life has all of our stories woven right into the fabric.  That time when we hit a deer on the drive home from Thanksgiving.  J's appendix surgery.  The welcoming of 5 beautiful and unique new humans into our family.  Camping trips and birthdays and Saturday morning breakfasts all of those ordinary moments that really make up the bulk of our lives.  Like a little boy saying "Dad" for the first time.  All of it is there, and when I look back for a moment, it seems hardly possible that all of this came about because of 2 people meeting at a conference at the tender ages of 19 and 16.

It's then that I remember that this, all of it, the two of us and the 6 little ones besides, we were all in a plan set in motion a very long time ago.  And while I'm unwrapping each moment like a surprise gift, Someone knows the trajectory of this story and watches me like a parent on Christmas morning, anticipating the excitement of what is coming next.

The snow is deep and the wind is bitter, but the sun is shining through clear skies. Each of these moments, the big and the small, all of it is a blessed gift - and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life unwrapping more and more goodness.

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