Time passing

Home!

Last Sunday, April 20th, the one year anniversary of living in this house crept past us nearly unnoticed. This house that felt like home from the first moment I stepped inside. This house that has seen us through a year of growth and change, and a lot of happiness. I find peace and refuge in this house in a way that I think I've really only known in my parents' home, the house where I grew up. It's a good house, and I am so thankful to make it our own.

Espen and his Grandad. Oh, how we miss him!

This coming Sunday, April 27th, will mark the one year anniversary of my father's death. It will be a hard day. Until my dad's birthday, I hadn't really given much thought to these milestones. Saturdays remain Saturdays even if that is the day of the week he died on. The 27th of each month is generally just a day like any other. But his birthday was hard. It made it so clear that his life had stopped. And I didn't expect it to be hard, so I was really blindsided when it happened. I was a little shocked to find myself in my bed during Gwen's nap, crying on the phone to Nick at work. So I am expecting Sunday to be a hard day. But that's OK. Having a hard day at the one year mark of losing my dad is OK. Being too afraid of pain and grief to acknowledge and give it the space it needs is not OK. So I'm taking some time and some of that space to feel whatever I feel.

I'd like to add that reaching the one year mark is kind of a good feeling too. Maybe there really was something to the old idea of having a mourning period? It's not like I'm going to be changing out of my black mourning dress, and on we go, but there is a sense of closure and something like accomplishment (is that weird?) to have made it through the first year. I still feel very sad that my dad is gone, but those feelings aren't as raw as they were a year ago. I don't think it's true that time necessarily heals all wounds, but time does decrease the acuteness of those wounds. I know that "time scabs over wounds into a scar so you're not bleeding all over the place anymore" isn't quite as nice of an adage, but there is some truth to it. I will always feel sad that my dad died too soon, but that sadness isn't as hard to bear as it once was. It's just a normal part of life now.

Whoosh, she's a toddler now!

Time has done that crazy thing it does where all of a sudden my little baby girl is closing in on being 18 months old. That old cliche about how "they grow up so fast" is proving to be alarmingly true in Gwen's case. I can hardly believe that this time last year we were waking up to feed her in the night and trying to teach her to sit up, and now she runs everywhere she goes and keeps trying to go head first down the slide. I feel like if I let her out of my sight, I might turn back around and discover that she's heading off to college. Not to mention her brother who is four and filled to the brim with questions about life, the universe and everything. If watching them learn and grow wasn't one of my very favorite things in the whole world, it would break my heart in two.

At the Grand Canyon in December.

And finally, in a few months Nick and I will be celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary. On the one hand, I can't even begin to comprehend where that time has gone. On the other hand, time before him and the life we have built together seems awfully far away. And it is such a very good life.