One day, today will be the "good old days"?
It's not often I get much from Instagram these days but this one stuck.
Hello lovely reader.
Do you still hang out on Instagram?
I have to use the app for work, juggling three different accounts on there at the moment and I am tempted every now and again to click on the stories at the top. My husband calls it procrastination, something which, I can proudly say I am very good at.
Nowadays, I try to use the app simply for my work clients and not linger any longer than is required. However, the other night I fell down one of those “lets just watch everyone else’s lives because mine is too busy and overwhelming at the moment”. I found this quote come up (amongst a few slides of other thought provoking messages but this one stuck):
What if these are the “good old days”?
Why did this hit a chord for me?
For the last year or so, I have been thinking back to the time not long after my second baby was born. We lived in a TINY mid-terrace house and filled every single corner of it with toys, furniture and parts of our own childhood we weren’t ready to part with. We dreamed of having a bigger house, space to grow our family and a separate room to put the kids toys.
I dreamed of being a children’s author and wrote what I thought was going to be a best-selling picture book. (It wasn’t and sits behind the armchair in our living room as a gentle reminder of how far my writing has come. I will never let go of “Alex and Ann” though and had so much fun dreaming up those characters and taking it into a preschool to read to young children.) I was in a bubble of dreams and it was wonderful.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a great period of our lives. Not everything was perfect, but when I look back we have so many happy memories and hardly ever argued. We may even refer to that time now as “the good old days”, despite it being a mere five years ago.
We were so caught up in the navigation of being young parents and finding our feet in the adulting world, we never once stopped to think “this is great”. But it was.
Now, after a stressful couple of weeks which has induced a head cold taking me to bed at 9pm most nights, I am trying to remind myself that in five more years time, I just might look back at this time and think “those were the good old days”.
Our children are young; however our eldest is teetering on the edge of his childhood and I am acutely aware that in just three short years he will be a teenager. What will our life look like then? Toddler groups and visiting the park during the day will soon be a thing of the past, or at least during term time.
Parenting young children is tough, but will I actually miss this stage when they are all teenagers? Absolutely yes.
I am unhappy with my weight at the moment but think this is more a transition period as I test what my 30’s feels and looks like. Time to let go of my twenty year old body, which lets face it, I did after having my third, and embrace this stage of my life. Because guess what? In ten years time I will no doubt look back and miss what I have now. Huh, it’s a funny old thing isn’t it.
I want to be that person who can just embrace life, laugh and not have a care in the world. I don’t think I will ever be quite like that as I am a notorious worrier. But hopefully it will help me get through those tough days knowing the only thing that is going to make them brighter is the way I interpret what really matters. What is actually important?
On that note, I better head off because my work list for today is ENORMOUS and the kids break up for the summer holidays tomorrow so I better get a wiggle on…
Want help planning your summer holidays? I wrote these which might help or hit reply to this post and we can chat!