20/52- Blocks

Since being back home from Germany, its taken a little while to adjust to some sort of routine around here. A part of that is figuring out how to carve time in for work stuff and keeping up with goals I had for this year, this blog being one of them. I took these a few weeks ago (around week 20 or something), but still want to document the moments I'm capturing, mostly for myself, to remember these sweet and fleeting memories of my girls. 

I'm really loving this age right now that the girls are in. The twins are still some what dependent on me for entertainment, but are moving into more and more independency. Early on when they were newborns, most days I found myself looking forward to when they could feed themselves, play on their own, and not need me to hold them constantly. I felt guilty for thinking that way, but a lot of times I just felt like I couldn't catch a breath or a wink of sleep to keep me going. I look back now on just a few months ago and ask myself the question I knew I would come to ask ..."how did we make it through!?!" 

My favorite moments are ones like in these photos. When all I can hear is toys crashing on the floor and laughter and hands and knees crawling around. I look over to check on them and see that they're all playing together, Raleigh helping her sisters put blocks together or giving them another toy to play with. One of the twins is either playing along or into discovering another object on her own, but still close enough to her sisters to not be totally alone. It seems like Raleigh could entertain herself for hours stacking up blocks as high as she can just knock them down and laugh about it. I think its the sweetest thing to watch kids be entertained by the littlest things in life. And I hope it is the simple things that keep them feeling the most entertained, loved, and free for the rest of their days. We don't have a ton of "toys" to keep them occupied. There's a small basket that fits in the bottom of our bookshelf that houses all the little things they sometimes play with and anything that doesn't fit gets tossed. One reason is that I'd go bazerk having any more toys floating around in our tiny house. But more than that our hope is that our kids can play and create and be adventurous in any scenario they're in. For the majority of Raleigh's first year of life she was entertained by banging a paintbrush to a plastic tupperware or figuring out how to unfold a blanket or listening to a magazine crumble. For me, the things I remember most about being a kid was building forts with my sister out of any blanket and piece of furniture we could find, sculpting things out of mud and water in the backyard, or climbing a tree pretending I was a lost boy from Peter Pan. It wasn't the tv or the computer that make me feel like I had a good childhood, it was the simplicity of creating fun out of what was around me and who was with me.

I hope that as they grow up I'll find them playing with each other more and more like this. Being entertained by and with each other in the simplest ways. There's something about this age that gets me so sentimental too, that they have no other cares or worries in the world than to stack blocks up high or see how a ball can roll across the floor. If only life could always be that way, right? Just makes me want to bottle up these moments to replay over and over again.