Are you guilty of this? I know I am! The other day I was talking to my husband about how different it is going to be next school year when the twins have all day Pre-K and the kids will all be a whole year older and wiser! Hopefully, they will be past the shenanigans that they are often up to these days. We continued to talk about how nice it will be and how (God willing) much easier it is going to be when they are more mature and we have time to ourselves…

Wait what! Why is this going to be nice? Why am I daydreaming about more free time and the kids at school? It is so easy to get caught up in the want for more “me time” when you are constantly at the beck and call or your little people.  But what does more “me time” mean in the grand scheme of things?

It means exactly that, more “me time”. More time by yourself, which is great right away, but soon it becomes lonely and irritating. Those tiny people who you have lost yourself in for the past however many years now have their own lives separate from you. They have friends that you don’t know, personalities that you may not see because they are different around you and time away from you to develop into what THEY want without your influence.  You can’t go back to who you were before kids, so you have to figure out who you are now. Do you like who you have become or do you feel lost without those tiny humans who so much of your day circled around? You no longer know what they are doing at all hours of the day and only learn about their day through them, which is like pulling teeth! Even as I type this, I wonder how my Kindergartner is right this second, is he feeling overwhelmed by school, if he is he happy,or if he likes it? I can ask him how his day was, but often there is no detail as to how his day really went.

Another thing “me time” means is that they don’t need you as much. Yeah, sure they will always need you, but not in the all encompassing way they do now. You know, the way they always want to be with you. My daughter follows me from room to room all day long like a little shadow watching everything I do, my baby lights up with joy at the sight of me!  You, as a parent, have the power to take away the hurt with a single kiss, the ability to scare away a monster with your presence and the capacity to fix all things with a single touch. You are a super hero. You are their world, just and they are yours. Soon, they will not need you to fix their problems and will do it all by themselves.

As much as I would like a little more “me time” I know right now that I am where I need to be. I am in the thick of it, forever exhausted by the constant needs of my little people. Looking to the future and what it may hold for us but realizing that the future means that time must pass. That my last baby will not longer be a baby, and my preschoolers will grow into school kids and my school kids to middle school then high school and gone. We really only get them for a short period of time, then we will have all the “me time” in the world. Embrace life and enjoy where you are at, because tomorrow will soon be yesterday…