Birthday Hours

May and June are a time of birthdays in our family. May 1st=Piper, May 14th=Camille, May 19th=H, June 9th=my mom, June 11th=Umberto, and June 22nd=H's mom. And then nothing until August when we celebrate my birthday (horror of horrors). So we spent a couple of months eating so much birthday cake we feel sick of cake for at least another year. I started a thing last year where I write a little blurb about each of my kids on their bdays...a sort of capsulating of their year and thoughts about their beginnings.

This year I realized how LITTLE they are. Normally, I feel this sort of nostalgia as I think about how old they're becoming. But this year...maybe because I've been listening to Destroyer so much...I just realized they're so new. Even Umberto, about to be 8, just hasn't been here very long. They're so fresh to life. Sometimes this freshness makes glaring my own cynicism about life, and when that freshness touches that dark place, that discouragement, I feel awakened like Spring. But other times, I feel an overwhelming sadness that this is what we are offering them.

And then I think about how for too many children 8 is already old.