Enjoy Every Minute!

It’s Kissing Season in the Hergenrader House.
Catie is very interested in who’s “allowed” to kiss on the lips, and Sam and Ellie have finally mastered big smacks that don’t involve opening their mouths.
This means lots of kissing, all the time.
I told Catie that moms and dads are the only ones who kiss on the lips (to avoid any playground frenching), and now she wants to know why I can’t kiss her on the lips. It’s a constant barrage of arguments: “But Maddie’s mom kissed her on the lips! But sometimes you kiss me on the lips! Why is it so bad?” So I backtracked that sometimes moms kiss their kids on the lips. Oh, my. Now her daily goal is to share such a goodbye kiss with me.
Compared to this drama, the twins’ little pecks are so sweet.
Bittersweet, actually.
For every story like this that I share with someone past the preschool phase of parenting, there’s someone who warns,”Enjoy every minute of this time! It passes too fast.”
What a threat.
Because, of course, you can’t enjoy every minute of anything. And this phase isn’t all sweet–there’s a lot of bodily fluids (tears and pee at the top of the list) that have nothing to do with first kisses.
And, I get it. Based on the fact I see very few moms cradling their grown sons while they cry or whose daughters want nothing more than to kiss them, this time is so fleeting. Too fleeting. And most of the time I do enjoy the minutes, am already sad they won’t be this small and dependent forever.
To the point that I used to love to be around teenagers. Now they seem too big. They’re a threat of what my kids will become.
I know my kids won’t pronounce “remember” as “memer” forever, they won’t wear their sunglasses upside down and think it’s normal forever, they won’t need me to tuck them into bed “one more time” for much longer. I’m guessing that Kissing Season won’t even last until the end of the month.
These new developments are coming, and I pray that God helps me embrace each phase, right up to the point they’re parents marveling at how the pigtails on their own kids’ heads can really only hold about twenty strands of hair.
In the meantime, I might start to tell those people who warn me to “enjoy this time!” that I am. In fact, I’ll tell them, that I hope to enjoy every single stage.
Even the teen kissing one when our four adolescents learn that on-the-lips kissing may not just be for moms and dads.
Ugh.