Mother's Day 2015...

So thankful for these boys that call me mom and the grace of God that keeps me pressing on...

"What I didn’t realize was what happens behind the storybook pages—underneath the strollers and the names and the “Mom” title. I didn’t know how deeply love could hurt, how much I’d be changed by it. I didn’t understand that there was a another character that complemented my mom’s feed-us, take-care-of-us, do-fun-stuff-with-us side we saw every day. That at night, she sometimes cried for us, prayed for us, worried about us, planned for us, examined and reexamined her choices, wondering if they were the right ones for us. As my kids get older—and really, probably more likely as I get older and learn more about the world—I understand this more. That motherhood is so much more than reading books and going for walks and having tickle fights on the bed. But the best way for me to process the intensity and the hard parts is to read books, go for walks and have tickle fights on the bed. We don’t draw chalk rainbows and hula-hoop in the driveway because we think life’s a big unicorn. We do it because we know it’s not. We accept that it’s hard, demanding, sad and lots of times confusing, so we bring the rainbows and hula-hoops.  And we color and twist our hips like it’s our job.
The same goes for motherhood.

It is hard, it is exhausting, it pushes our limits, it pulls our emotions. So we lean in to all of it and draw fuel for the Ebb from the excess of the Flow.

Every time I face challenges in motherhood, whether it’s exhaustion, frustration or sadness, I run for the hula-hoop. Hitch up the stroller for a walk, cue the music for a kitchen dance, watch them chase each other around the kitchen island in fits of giggles, play airplane from our bed, sketch hopscotch squares in the driveway, pull them into my neck and smell their cheeks, kiss their foreheads, feel them breathe. It doesn’t make the challenges go away, but it smoothes the path to go through them." - Kelle Hampton