A Year's Growth and Change

I'm just going to put this photo in a post here before I switch it out to my new header photo for the blog. The photo currently on the header was taken a year ago. Wow, these kids have changed so much in the last year, in so many different ways. But you can really see it when you look at the photos!

Here's last year's:

One of the biggest changes is that he's SO much taller now. They used to be a lot closer in size than they are now. And a quick peek at the "How tall in Fall" height chart at our local pumpkin patch shows him closing in on 6' (or at least trying to stretch as tall as possible to look that way!). One look at those huge puppy feet though says he might now be done growing yet!

Asa was having fun stocking up on the small pumpkins from the bin at the pumpkin patch. "Wild Walt" takes everyone on his hayride on a crazy ride, doing donuts in the mud and climbing up the sides of embankments while everyone screeches. Then he takes you through fields with scarecrows and other targets that you can throw the small pumpkins at. What fun!

Yep, It Happened

He's taller than me. 5'7" and counting...

And the Reason I Had to Buy All That Food?

Mackenzie grew an inch just in the last 3 weeks. No wonder he ate my cooler full of food on the camping trip! Now he is officially exactly as tall as I am, and two inches shorter than his dad. Of course, he's still a good eight to nine inches shorter than his half-brothers, so he may yet have a lot more growing to do!

I'll have to take a back-to-back photo this week!

If the Shoe Doesn't Fit...

Here's a great visual for you of the generation gap. In the middle are my mom's shoes which she wore when she dated my dad. They're about a size five I think. I couldn't squeeze half of my big flippers into them. Even Asa at age ten can't get her feet into them (she's now into a ladies' size 7). Then comes my feet, at size eleven they are not dainty. But hey, I'm a swimmer and they make great flippers. My dad (size 12) always said he gave me a good foundation in life, and he was right! On the outside are Mackenzie's shoes. Size 13: same as his age. I sure hope they don't go up in size as he gets older! As it is, he looks so much like Jeremy from Zits it's scary. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the creators of Zits are parked across the street from my house with binoculars gathering source material on a daily basis.

Last week Mackenzie and I went camping together for a few days. I packed an enormous amount of food, in quantities that could've seen Hannibal and his elephants safely over the Alps. I'm not kidding:

One package of hot dogs
Two pounds of hamburger
Two quarts of pasta sauce
Two packages of pasta
One can of refried beans
One loaf of bread
One bag of tortillas
One brick of cheese
A gallon of milk
A half gallon of pancake batter, pre-made and ready to go
A jar of peanut butter and one of jelly
A container of hummous
A dozen eggs
Carrots, celery, grapes, watermelon, salad, snap peas, apples, bananas
4 Clif Bars
Two containers of nuts
One baggie of raisins
One box of graham crackers
Two bars of chocolate
One bag of marshmallows

AND.... you guessed it, I had to go to a grocery store three days into the camping trip to resupply. No, I am not making this up. The kid has grown four inches this year and somehow managed to lose five pounds in the process, despite eating us into the poorhouse.

See How They Grow

The milestones of the year show you so clearly the passing of time, and when you have kids that passage is even more exaggerated. Still, some years go by without the kids changing too much visibly. The year from 12 to 13 however is not such a year. I was just struck by looking at the photos of Mackenzie with last year's spring chickens. He looked like a boy.


Fast-forward a year, half a foot of growth, a smallish moustachy kind of thing on his upper lip, and the teenagey haircut and wow!
My great big honking teenage son! Not visible in photo: size 13 feet.























And then there's Asa:




Granted, the red hair looks alarmingly different, but her face is subtly different as well. Less chubby baby cheeks, more grown-up big girl face. More big-girl attitude sometimes as well, LOL. Ah, I so love my big kiddos, I love every bit of their getting older, even as I miss their younger selves as well. I love laughing at the same lines in movies, having philosophical discussions, having them cook breakfast and even clean it up! They are fun to hang out with and are becoming the most amazing people possible.

Like Sand Through the Hourglass...

I had the disconcerting experience last night of going to watch a dance recital and seeing a boy that M. used to play with (like play as in build sandcastles and vroom trucks and all that kind of boy play) up on stage dancing Salsa with a girl and flinging her over his knee in a sultry kind of way. This kid is now somewhere over six feet tall, a smooth dancer and can hardly be referred to as a boy anymore. Yet he's only 3.5 years older than M.! At going-on-11, M.has morphed into a fast-growing weed with a ever-huskier voice that seems to mostly say variations on "I'm hungry, mom". He grew an inch in the last six weeks. Could it be so very far away that he too will be six feet tall and twirling teenage girls in red dresses? It seems impossible, yet when I watched his former playmate on stage, it just seemed like a blink of an eye ago that they had Hot Wheels cars and Bionicles all over the driveway. Some days it still seems like I have a young boy, zooming spaceships or excitedly telling me about his Pokemon cards. On another day, he's far too cool to drink from my pink water bottle ("humiliating" is the latest descriptive word for such actions).

Couple all of this with watching Miss Diva onstage in her snazzy jazzy dance costume doing her routine and looking just way too grown up (yet flashing me her jack-o-lantern missing-toothed smile afterwards) and you've got a season of awe-inspiring growth going on. Just about every day I am shocked by something one or both of them does that just seems so much older than the day before. Might be the way they answer the phone, the way they hang out together on the couch and chat or read books next to each other, the phrases they use that are less childlike than what they might've said a day, a week, or a month ago. It's both beautiful and utterly frightening to see them changing so quickly before my eyes. I guess I was prepared for this in the early years when milestones come fast and furious. But sometime in the last few years I got lulled by the fact that they seemed reasonably the same from one day to the next. I think though that we've hit another one of those times when growth and change comes quickly and catches me off-guard.

At least the lazy summer days are finally upon us, we can spend plenty of time just relaxing and enjoying each others' company. We finally got a digital video camera, so at least I can capture some of what they are like in this moment on film (when I can wrestle the camera away from M., who seems to delight in making "Garden Roller Coaster" movies, where the camera zooms sickeningly around the yard, or movies in which his little sister is some kind of roaring monster).