We don't have young adults...yet

I am completely aware that I have kids that are pretty much big now.  (In fact, my youngest will only allow certain semantics to be used when referring to his maturity, lest we accidentally refer to him as a "little boy").  But with some things still remaining constant, like that this house is still pretty much quiet between 1:30 and 3:30 pm for nap time, sometimes it's easy to forget that my kids are getting big.  (But not like "young adult" big, which is how Paige would prefer to be called - thank goodness!)

However, there are some times that I stop and look around and realize that time is, indeed, passing by.  One of my closest friends had that same epiphany recently and just wrote about it too, here.  I definitely had playground moments this last summer when I realized I had 2 free hands and could finish a full sentence with adults around me.  Today's moment came at church.  The bigs were at Sunday school and Cole comes to service with us.  We sat in the pews marked "reserved for families with small children" as we always do.  It was a particularly noisy morning in church today.  There was a toddler to our front who loved to blurt out sounds, a 1-week old behind us whose mother was desperately trying to feed her, and several other vocal little ones that were carried out in tantrums or bribed to be quiet for another 2 minutes.  And, well, you know you have graduated from the "family with small children" when your 3-year old leans over and complains about the crying babies as he is quietly driving cars along his body. 

Another reminder came later today when Rich and I were able to complete a tiling project in the bathroom.  Yes, during kid waking hours!  They played with each other, got snacks for themselves and (except for shouting questions from downstairs instead of coming up and speaking to us) were barely noticeable at all! 

I'm not being nostalgic about it.  Yes, I desperately wanted to hold that 1-week old today in church just to see what it feels like again, but I surely would have wanted my own 2 arms back shortly after.  And watching home movies a couple weeks ago did make me long to hear the slapping hands of a crawling baby on the floor.  But we did that.  And now we get to see things like two kids in a heated game of Battleship, or hear two kids having inside jokes with each other (not about us, of course), or hear three kids reading (well, for Cole it's more like memorized playback), or have an in-depth discussion of what age is worthy of the "young adult" classification.

And at the end of the day, we still get some pretty hysterical reminders that they are, indeed, still kids.  Like when Cole puts his nose in the bend of his elbow and states, "Hmmm, my armpits smell like candy."  Yup, still kids.