My Birthday Boy - Chicago Area Family Photographer

My little guy turned 4 years old yesterday.  I tell him he is "my special boy" and he certainly is.  Every year on my kiddos birthday's we tell them the story of their birth.  They love to hear it.  We talk about what happened that day and their eyes just light up listening and soaking it all in. 

I tell him that he was my gift.  We thought we were done having babies and then surprise.  I leave out the part about me crying when I found out I was expecting a third baby.  When I was pregnant I didn't understand what a gift he really was.  What I knew, at that time was that hubby was getting out of the Army and we were going to move again.  We lived in South Carolina and I had a wonderful community of friends - it was so difficult to say good bye.  I even loved my doctor.  But at 7 months pregnant we moved back to the Chicago land area.  Even though family was now only an hour away, I never felt more alone.  We had to start all over again.  Hubby had a big break in his job hunt and was hired by a police department.  The catch was he was off to the police academy 3 weeks after J was born.  Monday thru Friday for several months I was a single mother of three small children including a newborn. 

This was the most challenging time of my life.  Hubby recalls this time as, "The most depressed you have ever been."  HA! He is probably right.  I did what I could to make it day by day. 

A friend posted a blog link recently that expressed perfectly what this time was like:   
"It’s getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again, and again, and yet again—and it’s watching it all get undone again, and again, and yet again. It’s humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.
It’s a monk’s work. Mothers are like monks. We do manual labor. We serve others. We nurse the sick. We feed the hungry and comfort the sad. We sing. We teach. We pray and practice, practice, practice patience. The work of a mother is repetitive. We fold the clothes, we wash the bowls, and we sing the same song and read the same bedtime story night after night."
http://momastery.com/blog/2013/05/28/on-momotony-and-sacred-work/

This was a special time in my life in which I was being taught humility, patience and faith.  I wish I would have done it more gracefully but I did it nonetheless.

He is my special boy... he taught me how to be a monk.

On the left, a year ago, when he turned 3.