Happy Mother's Day!

So I couldn't be home to see my mommy on Mother's Day, but she was definitely the first person I talked to today (mostly because Adam was too asleep to even open his eyes) to let her know that I was thinking about her. She's the person I call if I have some exciting news to tell or something funny happened or just to call for 'whatever.' I think I started appreciating both of my parents more and more when I went away to college and started having to 'be an adult' myself. I could see the people around me and the different ways their parents raised them, only to think "my parents did it better." I can't wait to be able to take my kids over to Grandma Von Wahlde's for holidays and birthdays like I have always loved with my family. I can't wait to call her in the middle of the night (oh yes...middle of the night) because my baby won't stop crying or had a little runny nose and I have absolutely no idea what to do. I've learned a lot from my mother over the past 27 years and I know I haven't even begun to learn as much as has to teach....I think I will be able to learn so much more once baby O'Neill arrives.

I love you, mommy. Happy Mother's Day!

So, I also consider this my last non-Mother's Day. My last day celebrating Mother's Day before I have an actual child to say that I'm officially a mother. I subscribe to Oprah's "Thought of the Day" (I know, I'm a dork who's obsessed with Oprah). A few months ago, a few days after I found out I was pregnant, I received the following quote. It helped to explain in words one of the reasons I want to be a mother myself:

"I had always wanted children. Partly, I wanted someone else to be more important than me; mySelf was a burdensome thing to keep carrying around. But I'd been missing that Self since my daughter's birth. I hadn't know it would be so eclipsed by the constant worry - had she burped, slept, peed? ("Sleep when she sleeps," the doctor said. I couldn't. I was too stunned. There were moments in those early days that when she cried, I cried too.) But that day I saw her from the window of the bus, I almost yelped aloud - not just with worry, with love. Minutes later I sat on the front stoop, and when the babysitter pushed the carriage around the corner, I felt a huge billowing of love that sat like a gigantic, soft helium balloon on my shoulders. I didn't know a person could feel that love, it was so large. But then, a few weeks later, I watch my little daughter wake from her nap, kick her little feet. And-whoosh!-that feeling of love grew exponentially. This kept happening as the weeks went by, and each time I was amazed. How could love be this big? That enormous, soft helium balloon got bigger and higher, until my love filled the skies. Boundless, as they say."
- Elizabeth Strout, author