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With Caspian now reaching the 6 month birthday {Tuesday} I have been finding myself thinking  a lot about what being a mom means to me. It’s easy to forget why you wanted to be a mom or why you love being a mom when you sleep in two-hour increments. It’s no surprise to you if you have been reading for the last 6 months that I have been struggling big time with the two kids. But my Mom {mother to 8} continues to remind me that the 2 kid jump is the hardest to make, but that if you can do that than any subsequent kids will be a breeze. Fingers crossed because my sanity is so long gone that I’m already ready to get pregnant again.

But back to what being a mom means to me. I haven’t always wanted to be a mom. In fact when I was tweenage I always reminded anyone who asked that I never wanted kids. In my limited scope of life I imagined that having kids would be like growing up in a large family. No privacy, noise & mess. Rinse & repeat. Having kids is nothing like that! Said no one ever. When I left Bible School I became obsessed with my large messy & noisy family & couldn’t wait to have the same thing. My cautious attitude of maybe only having one child quickly turned to 4 and then 6 and sometimes even teetered on 8.

We all know that being a mother isn’t easy; more days than I can count sometimes I think what it would be like to get in the car & just drive. I’d always turn around & come back, but first I would drive for a long while. Being a mother almost always means giving up something, giving up you a lot of the time. For me its sacrificing my time, my sanity, my semi-clean house, my nails, my roots, my waist line. You name it and it’s suffering.

For me where I’m losing the battle of self-versus mother I’m also gaining. Exchanging my time to blog to take a walk with my boys & talk about what we would do if Megatron suddenly appeared in front of us. Being a mother means sitting all day in the sun having picnic lunches & creating new traditions like family date night. Being a mother means being the only person in the world who knows what Phoenix means when he says he’s allergic to food or being the only person in the world that can comfort Caspian & although that brings its own set of problems its sweet.

Being a mother to me means laughing when you want to cry, laughing when you want to scream. Being a mother means laughing when all your previous efforts to get your child to eat vegetables, to fall asleep on their own, to take a bottle, to clean up their toys fails.

It’s laughing. It’s smiling. Dancing, crawling, jumping & a billion other action words. 

And that my friends is my brain dump on what being a mom means to moi.