Last night, I took Kendell by the shoulders and shook him (as much as I can "shake" my husband!) and said "do you know what happens tomorrow? Tomorrow I will have an empty house!" and then I burst into tears.

(goofing off with cousins at a family party in June)

Because while I will appreciate the quiet, I wasn't ready. Because while I am glad they are back to schedules and homework and tasks and actually using their brains, I wanted more time with them at home. Because this year, I didn't want summer to end.

(model faces on one of Haley's visits home)

Not that it didn't hold its many challenges. There were plenty of arguments and chore wars and some pretty intense discussions about choices, the future, and consequences. (Parenting teenagers is not for the weak of heart.) I have had plenty of moments when I have sat on my back porch and questioned every single choice I've made in the past 17 years and wondered how I managed to make such a mess of things. Or I've been so mad I couldn't sit still.

(Kaleb's 10th birthday family dinner)

And it hasn't been the summer I wanted it to be. Jake and Nathan both had lots of scout adventures, but when it came down to us taking a family vacation, I couldn't get anyone to commit or want to take time off of work. Then I decided, I don't care, they're going anyway, this is Jake's last summer before he graduates. So I planned a beach vacation on the central California coast, starting in Cayucos and ending in San Francisco, with a day of driving the Big Sur highway, a zipline excursion, an afternoon in Muir Woods, and of course tickets to Alcatraz, with maybe a stop in Yosemite on the drive home.

(Jake works at Pizza Pie Cafe, and they were one of the entries in the parade. You should see him toss pizza dough. It's pretty amazing!)

But I waited too long. Alcatraz was sold out, all of the non-scary hotels along the coast were booked, Haley decided she couldn't afford to miss that much work.

(on Pioneer Day, Utah's state holiday)

So there wasn't a family vacation this summer. (Even though the one I planned would have been awesome.)

(This is on Father's Day. It took awhile to get them to stop goofing off, but I love the photos I took of them laughing together.)

Back in the first week of June, when summer was just starting, what I wanted was for our family to draw closer and get stronger. I also wanted to make some good memories. I'm not sure I accomplished that. It was more complicated and messy. But as I sent Jake and Nathan off to high school together this morning, I realized it doesn't matter what I wanted to do. My chance at an idyllic summer is over. I didn't do all of it—but I think we are a little bit closer and stronger, despite the rough and complicated bits. Or maybe even because of them.

(Kaleb played lots of soccer this summer!)

What I realized this morning as summer ended is that what I want is to hold on somehow, to everything that is fleeting, to the structure of my family right now before it changes again, and the activities and vacations are the way I try to do that. But it is also (or perhaps really) in the small moments—the time we laughed at a joke we probably shouldn't, or someone was unexpectedly kind, or we talked about nothing really important—that matter most to me. That is what life is, really, not the vacations or the extravagant outings, but the time we had together, where ever it happened.

(It isn't a successful summer unless we both FIND a snake in the yard and TEASE Kendell with it!)

I just find, here at the end of summer, myself in the mental space I have been in for all of these years of raising teenagers. Wishing I could be better at it, somehow. Doubting my ability to be the mom my kids actually need. Wishing they could step into my heart somehow so they would know my intentions. Wondering if I have really shown them that I love them, if they can ever even know that. Wishing my heart could be still and I could just be confident, somehow, in feeling I had done anything right.

(Kaleb and I had an adventure at a new man-made pond in my hometown. I taught him how to float on his back,)

The extra week of summer I feel like we needed could hardly have accomplished that anyway.

(Nathan is the grill master!)

One of my friends says that the first day of school for kids is the equivalent of Christmas for moms: all the wishes finally fulfilled. There have been summers when I have felt that way, too. But as time runs out on summers with kids at home, the first day of school is less and less a reward for me. More and more, it is a reckoning. Did I do enough? Did I tell them I love them? Did I show them any happiness? I tried. I both failed and succeeded. I can only keep trying—to hold on, to savor, to show them I love them in my imperfect ways. To hope it will have been enough.

(My favorite day this summer, when we all went to Lagoon and had a great time together. These people—my family is who matters most to me. Always.)

Wait—who says that? Who could hate summer, with its flowers and its break from school and its long days of lingering sunshine? 

OK, maybe hate is too strong a word. Dislike. Am made uncomfortable by. Have a complicated relationship with.

I mean, it's not the kind of negative emotion I have for Valentine's Day.

Or even Mother's Day.

It's just...well, summer is my least-favorite season. Even though I love so many things about it: yes, the flowers, but also running that's rarely interrupted by weather, hiking, summer vacations, green everywhere, late-afternoon thunderstorms, mowing the lawn, backyard barbecues.

I love all of those things.

But sometimes the things I don't love about summer outweigh what I do. Namely:

1. Shorts. Seriously. I have been shopping for my entire adult life for shorts I look good in, and I have never found them. The length doesn't matter—what matters is that my thighs look enormous in shorts. There's something about pants that balances out my disproportionate quads (just a little...I am always self-conscious about my legs) but in shorts they just look awful. And this isn't limited to regular, every-day shorts; it's also a problem with running shorts. You know those tiny little swishy running shorts that most runners wear? Yeah. Those don't work in my thigh-touching world. But running shorts with any sort of looseness also look pretty awful on me. Like I'm an escaped junior-high PE teacher. It's kind of strange, but true: the only running shorts that don't look awful on me are the tight ones. The tight long ones.

2. Short sleeves. Nope...my summer clothing disagreements are not limited to shorts. The older I get the more aware I am of my chubby arms. In every other season I can manage this self-consciousness with one of my favorite clothing items, the cardigan. But even I (with my body's occasional inability, due to my unhappy thyroid, to properly manage my body temperature) can't go around in cardigans all summer.

3. It's hot. I don't like being cold, either. (Apparently this post is devolving into one big whine-fest.) But I have a tendency to be emotionally effected by the heat. And not in a good way. Translation: I can turn fairly quickly, in a hot room or building, into a raving psychopath. (It’s not as bad outside.) Being hot makes me grumpy, and it's usually not reversible like being cold is. You can always add layers but there are only so many clothes you can take off.

4. Hay fever. This isn't a problem every year. For reasons unknown (but which I could probably uncover if I went to an allergist), some years are really bad and some years I never sneeze once. This has been my worst hay fever summer for five or six years and I am not happy to be so forcefully reminded of how miserable the sneezing and the constant throat tickle and the always-burning eyes are. What makes it worse is I can't function if I take hay fever meds. Even the non-drowsy ones turn me into a sort-of living zombie. I did have a little bit of success the year I tried Singulair. No itchy nose or raspy lungs. Unfortunately it made me bawl. Random, unpredictable crying. Not as bad as Prednizone but close.

5. Swimming. I don't mean swimming in nature. But, you know, putting on a swimming suit and sunscreen and finding the goggles and the snacks and the beach towels and then going to a swimming pool. My kids love it (well...Kaleb still loves swimming. Jake & Nathan only want to do nothing. See #6.)  and I just...don't. I can remember loving it, especially the long afternoons Becky and I spent in the pool at the Landmark casino in Las Vegas. But now that I'm grown up, swimming annoys me. It has more than a little to do with the same reason I hate shorts (chubby thighs). Maybe if I had the slender legs of women whose thighs don't touch, I'd also love swimming. (And really. Don't even get me started on swimming suits. The one part of my body that isn't chubby is the only part I wish were, as well as the part that swim suits try to emphasize. If you have any. Which I don't.)

6. The kids are home. OK, that sounds even more awful than saying I hate summer. I love spending time with my kids, and I love having them around, and I love that we don't have to worry about homework, grades, exams, forgotten projects. But Bad Mom syndrome starts setting in pretty quickly—it flashes up when I realize all that they've mostly done with entire days is watch TV, play video games, and eat snacks. (This article pretty well sums up what I mean. Really. If you're a mom with kids at home, you should read it. I'll wait.) And argue with me about the jobs they don't want to do. All of my Mom Failings are highlighted in the summer. At least for the rest of the year I make sure they, you know, go to school 'n stuff. I want to be one of those fabulous moms who has tons of activities planned for her kids...but usually that involves swimming. And, let’s face it: the teenagers don’t want to do anything else. They don’t want to go to the pool, the zoo, the mountains for a picnic. They’d rather nah. So then I feel bad that they don’t want to do anything, and I feel bad for not making them or I feel bad FOR making them, and I feel bad for Kaleb who ends up doing less stuff.

7. Sunburns. I used to love lying out in the sun. Used to, when my skin had the capacity to get brown. Now it just burns and peels, burns and peels, in an unending cycle that's only punctuated by the weird even-whiter dots I get instead of a tan. True, I do​ love peeling. Except, I don't love worrying about skin cancer and wrinkles. 

8. Miscellaneous annoyances. Bugs! (especially mosquitos, which love me, and flies, which I detest.)  It's too hot to cook my favorite meals. Traffic—one of the reasons I'm not a fabulous mom with tons of activities planned is that everyone else is also going, and the older I get the less I can deal with lots of annoying people everywhere. The electricity bill (hate it though I do, I'll happily pay it. Probably my neighbors and/or friends would be willing to pay it if I refused, because the cost of air conditioning is so much more bearable than a grumpy Amy). The untenable process of blowing your hair dry after a shower and even though you're paying a $*(#&$ fortune for air conditioning it is apparently no match for the heat of your blow dryer, which never seems to dry a damn lock of hair because the water from the shower just gets replaced with sweat.

As I wrote my list, I realized something: most of the things I dislike about summer are things I wish I could change about myself. Or maybe just accept with more grace. Maybe, in the end, that’s the reason I don’t like summer: it forces me to see more clearly my faults. They’re easier to overlook in the other seasons. 

This morning, I slept in to a glorious 9:00 a.m., and then I got up to make breakfast for Kaleb. Jake and Nathan (being teenagers) were still asleep, and Kendell was working on homework, so it was just me and Kaleb in the kitchen. Scrambling eggs, cooking buttery hash browns, serving up orange juice. Talking about his favorite music (Imagine Dragons and One Republic) and the birthday party he went to yesterday and how excited he is for school to be out.

I feel like I’ve made great strides, lately (a lot of them since writing this post, which helped me process in ways I didn’t know I needed to process), in enjoying my teenagers. I’ve worked to stop referring so much to their younger years and to love them for who they are right now. I am happier as a mom and less acutely-tuned to my mistakes. I’m much more aware of the goodness that comes in having teenagers. We’ve had some really great conversations and I feel like things are more open and honest and healthy for all of us.

I have some great teenage boys.

But I am also grateful I still have a little one. I’m grateful to be reminded to play, to run outside, to fill every free second possible with kicking a soccer ball. Sure, he’s not little little anymore. He’s almost getting preteen-ish. But he still does some little-kid stuff. He’ll curl up next to me in bed sometimes. He tells me all of his stories. He says sweet and innocent funny things. (Like last week, when he was telling me what he learned in his language arts class about Greek myths, and I helped straighten out the details of the Persephone story. When I said, “so Persephone gets to spend the spring and summer with her mother, Demeter, and that’s why there are flowers then. Six months with her mom,” Kaleb said, “six months solid with your mom? That’s probably good enough” and it still makes me laugh.) Maybe that’s it—that he still has the innocence of childhood. He still loves gently and simply. It’s uncomplicated and sweet.

(I have a high forehead...but somehow in selfies it looks ridiculously, weirdly high)

There are five and a half years between Nathan and Kaleb. Sometimes this big age gap is a problem. Sometimes (OK, quite often), I wish I would’ve had one more baby, right after Kaleb was born, so that he could have a sibling his age. But sometimes the gap is perfect. Having a little one while you also have teenagers means living with feet in both sides of motherhood. It is a balancing act, but it keeps you even. It gives you perspective—the little one won’t always be difficult in the way that little ones are, the teenagers weren’t always difficult in the way they are now. It is a peace and a comfort having a little hand to hold.

One day soon, Kaleb himself will be a teenager. Considering that age gap, there will be a good long while when he’s the only kid in the house. The only teenager. It does make me worry: how will I cope with him being a teenager without having a little one to balance me out? Maybe I’ll have a grandchild by then. Maybe Kendell will just have to buck up and deal with me getting a cat. Maybe I will find something else I don’t know about that will make things be OK.

It won’t always be like this: high schoolers and grade schoolers, all in one house. It is a good, sweet, busy time of life. And it felt important this morning, while we cooked eggs and giggled because I spilled the orange juice, to put it down in words so I don’t forget. 

It’s been a good week.

Well, of course, some strangeness and problems. My hamstrings have not been doing well; I’ve been exercising anyway but I’m hobbling instead of walking. I seemed to have developed a new stalker at work, and there’s this other patron who comes in to use our computer, who entirely creeps me out on a good day, but I had to get a little bit fierce with him this week to keep him in his place. (If ever there were anyone who would go postal in our library, it would be him. He makes me nervous.) I’m completely off the no-sugar wagon and have given up until after Mother’s day when I plan on starting again. I was up all night last night with my mom, who is back in the hospital with pneumonia. Oh how terrifying those 1:17 a.m. phone calls are! When Kendell’s phone rang and we startled awake, he said “That’s your sister calling, it can’t be good news. Are you sure you want me to answer?” and I was still sleep-groggy enough to think, just for a second, that not answering the phone would keep the bad news from being real. At least it wasn’t devastating. At least she’ll be OK.

Plus I’m fairly mad at the Gray’s Anatomy writers.

And then there was the vandalism incident with Kaleb, which is a whole other story.

(I always have to preface happiness with hardness, like it is a talisman or a sign to The Universe: I’m not too happy that I need to be reminded of anything.)

My good week started last Thursday, with a reunion of sorts. (I’m sorry…I’m going to be vague because I am not ready to blog about it yet.) I have wanted this thing to happen for decades but I couldn’t ever be certain it would. It is the answer to many hopes and wishes. One of the things I didn’t expect from this experience is how it has also reunited me with some lost parts of myself that I thought I had to put away in the name of adulthood, but maybe I didn’t. Plus the knowledge that sometimes, hard choices turn out better than you could imagine when you made them.

Then Haley came home for a few days, after she finished her finals, so we could celebrate her birthday. It hit me at her party: now that she’s twenty, I will never again be the mom of three teenagers. I should perhaps be melancholy about the passage of time, but instead I feel glimmery—I am excited to see their futures unfold.

(awful photo captured from Snapchat. awful quality, adorable image.)

We had dinner on Sunday with my mom (red bean burritos because Haley loves them and they’re one of the only vegetarian meals I make), who wasn’t sick yet and is doing remarkably well as she continues to heal from her back surgery.

I had some good and very needed conversations with all of my Bigs. There were a bunch of little things that happened that reminded me how much I love each of my kids and how blessed I am to be their mom. We listened to Hozier all weekend. We had some kitchen dance sessions and some interpretive rain dancing. We laughed and told jokes and stories, we had French toast for breakfast and midnight snacks of Scor cake.

Haley and I went to lunch and did some shopping (new running shoes for her birthday). She is turning into a grown up. We agree on many things and disagree on others, but it feels like our relationship is shifting in positive and healthy ways. More, it’s just good to see her living this part of her life with such determination, courage, and happiness.

I did a little bit of scrapbooking and my massive, ruthless reorg/purge of my scrapbooking supplies is coming along nicely.

Plus it has rained all week.

And when it wasn’t raining I was working in my flower beds, planting the rest of the astilbe, ferns, and hostas I’d bought awhile ago.

Perhaps from that reunion on Thursday. Probably, in fact. But also because of feeling surrounded by my family, by being able to see and feel and know how much I love them and that they love me back. For many reasons, this week I have felt such lightness. Light in the sense of not dark. Open and hopeful. The opposite of how I felt in January and February.

And as much as I am willing to acknowledge what is hard, I wanted The Universe to know I know: it was a good week and I am thankful to have received it. 

Whenever I am taking photos for someone else, especially engagement pictures, I try to watch out for the dreaded Zombie Hand. Zombie Hand (ZH) happens when someone has his/her arm around someone else; from the front, you can see the hand, but the line of the arm is broken by something else so the hand is just sort of there, but not optically connected to anything else. Just disembodied body parts. An example, from our 2010 Christmas photo shoot just because they're some of my favorite family photos:

I know this doesn't always absolutely ruin a picture. I mean, look at this photo:

Absolutely adorable picture, bad ZH! But I would love this so more without the ZH clawing towards Kaleb's cute face. It always bothers me. So when we're having a family photo taken, I always say "no zombie hand!" before the photographer starts shooting. But since our family photo shoots always nearly immediately devolve into something like this:

worrying about ZH is probably pointless. (I'm serious. 90% of all Sorensen family photo shoots look like this, except lately there has also been an influx of "OMG, I'm going to die if there is one more photo taken" faces.)

But I still have the habit. No zombie hand!

One kid in particular, lately, has hated having his picture taken. That'd be Jake. He just hates the whole experience. But come on...I need at least a few photos every couple of months, yes? So I told my boys this year that for my birthday, I wanted a photo of each of them and then one of them with me. We took the ones of Nathan and Kaleb on the Sunday before my birthday, but Jake was extra-grumpy so I decided to wait until this Sunday, when Haley would be home (she can always make him laugh!) to take them.

When she was about to take the photo, I could tell he was doing ZH. Totally on purpose. So I tried to play along, and we ended up with this photo:

not just zombie hand, but my attempt at zombie face, too. Sort of goofy, but I love this picture! It captures so many things about our relationship. Maybe not in an obvious way, but my eye can see them. 

When I looked at it tonight after downloading my memory card, it sort of took my breath away, in fact. It reminded me to worry less about trying to create the best images (technically) and more about creating the real images. The ones that say something true and real and honest and right now.

Don't get me wrong. I'll still say "no zombie hand!" whenever I'm in a picture I'm not taking. But I'm going to try to have more fun instead of being so worried about perfection.

This girl turned twenty today.

Twenty! I can still remember how it felt when the doctor handed her to me for the first time. She was a beautiful baby, right from the start. My doctor’s last baby had been born just a few days before, and when he saw her he said “Wow, she is way more gorgeous than my baby!” (a story which still makes me smile). I took her into my arms and I saw that she was beautiful, but she was also something else. Right from the start, I could sense her strong personality. Think about how many babies come into the world on any given day…bajillions. Perhaps every mother feels that unique spirit emanating from her baby, though. The thing that makes—or, really, will make—this new person who she is. I’m not sure if all moms feel that, but I did. She wasn’t just another baby in the world to me. She was entirely herself, already strong willed and passionate and smart, I thought.

I couldn’t wait to see who she would become.

There is something about your first baby. You don’t know yet to savor because you don’t know how fast the days will pass, and so you look forward. I couldn’t wait for her to be born and then once she was here, I looked forward to all of her firsts. A few years after she was born, I read this idea (from The Poisonwood Bible) and it was so exactly true to how I felt as a new mom with Haley: “A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.”

Two decades later, I am still cheering her feet. I am still watching her strong, passionate, smart personality develop. I am still so grateful to be her mom.  She has taught me…well, I almost wrote “everything I know about motherhood,” which isn’t true. I have learned about motherhood from each of my babies, from all of them. But she has had to be the trailblazer. The trial run, the person wise enough to withstand my bumbling attempts and kind enough to forgive my mistakes.

Twenty years in, I am seeing what I only could imagine as a possibility when I first saw her. Within those general traits of her spirit, she is creating her very specific life. I think she is amazing. I think she can do anything. I can’t wait, still, to see her future unfold. And, 7,300 days later (give or take a few leap years), I still am humbled that I got to be her mom.

You know when you have those moments when you look at your kids and just think…holy cow, they are amazing? You can see it even when they’re stressing you out or making you crazy, whether they’re two or twelve or almost-twenty. I love those transcendent moments. Haley came home for Easter last weekend, and maybe it was seeing them all together that reminded me. Or maybe it’s that I am feeling stronger and happier as spring progresses.

Or maybe it’s just that they really are amazing.

I just feel like sharing this: I am so proud of my kids.

I am proud of Haley.

She is working so hard right now. She’s taking 18 credits at school, and not easy classes either—calculus and biology and Spanish. She works 30+ hours a week at two different jobs. She’s keeping her grades up and doing well at her jobs.

But even more, she is becoming emotionally intelligent. She is starting to see things from different perspectives. She’s a feminist. She makes me laugh. She is strong willed and determined and I love her so much.

I am proud of Jake.

Math and science come so easily for him, he hardly has to study. Even though he doesn’t love school, he works hard to keep up his grades while he’s holding down a job. He recently got promoted to the training manager.

But even more, he is working on the changes he needs for this time of his life. He is striving to overcome his weaknesses and learn from his choices. He makes me laugh in ways that are entirely his own and I love him so much.

I am proud of Nathan.

(Because why not dye Easter eggs without your shirt?)

Even with being on student council, the basketball team and now the track team, he makes sure he gets a 4.0 every term. He is early for church every Sunday and fulfills his responsibilities without complaining.

But even more, he is just a good kid. He is friendly and open and willing to talk to me about nearly everything. He makes me feel loved and appreciated and I love him so much.

I am proud of Kaleb.

He is getting better and better at enjoying reading. (He is working his way through all of Roald Dahl’s books.) He makes sure to get his homework done even without help and he has the best handwriting.

But even more, he is such a good friend. He tries to make sure everyone in his street posse is included when they go out to play night games. His sense of humor brings me so much happiness and I love him so much.

I am so blessed to be their mother.

(before everything got a little bit tense and argumentative and sad, which is a story I might or might not blog about.)

Last year, Becky sent this picture to me on Christmas Eve day:

It made me tear up. That is Christmas 1972, when I was 8 months old, the five of us at my grandma's house. It’s one of those awful 1970’s photos, but I love it so much. Look at that big camera my dad is holding, with the flash—the kind that had to have the bulb replaced with each picture—and my mom’s beehive hairdo! Look at how Michelle is loving her new baby doll! And Suzette’s pinafore dress, no doubt crocheted by my mother. There are shadows of the future there: Suzette looks so much like her first daughter, Kayci, would look fifteen years later, and there is something about Michelle kissing her doll that reminds me of her daughter, Lindsay, holding her own daughter Josie. The mountain behind me is the one that I loved my whole life (although I have only ever looked at it, as there are no trails there), which would become a sort of protector to me, a solace from looking. There is still a Becky-shaped gap. There is my grandma Elsie’s handwriting, and the picture itself which she took; she always made sure to take pictures and in doing so left pieces of herself behind, so she is there taking the picture, and I am there, taking pictures in the future because she (and my dad) took pictures.

Just a bad 70’s snapshot. But so much more than a bad 70’s snapshot.

I thought about this picture on Christmas Eve, when it was still peaceful. All four of my kids were downstairs by the tree, watching Christmas movies and waiting for me to finish up some of my baking. I was doing all of the prep work: I made crust for a raspberry pie, and started the berries macerating; I baked the chocolate cake for the next day while I made double-chocolate cookie dough. I browned the sausage for the morning’s casserole and made sure I had all of the ingredients for wassail. As I cooked, I remembered. The Christmases when they were all still little. The Christmas when Nathan was a baby, and they’d all had the chicken pox sequentially so I didn’t do any shopping until December 20. The Christmas when I was pregnant with Jake (he was born five days later) and Haley and I made cookies on Christmas-Eve afternoon to leave out for Santa that night. Her baby Christmas, which was the first year we had a tree. Kaleb’s baby Christmas, when he was sick with an ear infection and so always covered in green boogers no matter how many times I cleaned his nose.  The first Christmas Haley knew about the Santa gig. Even last year, when she helped me set out all of the gifts.

Also back further, to my own childhood Christmases. I’m not sure why, but that photo made me remember one Christmas, I must’ve been 16, when my favorite present was a pair of black skinny jeans. They had big, faded flowers on them and made me feel like a seriously bad-ass punk rocker. I loved those pants and I loved my mom for getting me those pants even though she didn’t want me to dress like I dressed or act like I acted.

For me, Christmas isn’t just about this Christmas. Christmas is memory, too. It is the ghosts of all Christmases, past, present, and future, lingering in the periphery. It’s why we moms work so hard to make Christmas magical. Well, we do it for the magic itself. But we also do it to give our children the memory of magic, so that when the magic itself has been revealed, the memory of it comforts and sustains.

Here is our family Christmas picture from 2014:

I look at it and I wonder: what shadows of the future are here? Which memories of this holiday will linger and cheer and make me nostalgic, or make my kids feel that sad/sweet Christmas-Eve memory feeling? Will it be enough to sustain them? Or the me I become in the future?

This, friends, this complicated layering and folding of time with images full of people we love who won’t always be here—this is why I take pictures, even though they are imperfect, and this is why I scrapbook, because then the stories are not only in my memory. It is a way of creating future ghosts that might return to the people we will be the love of who we are right now.

When I drove Nathan to school this morning (he usually rides his board, but he had a ton of extra stuff today so I drove him instead), I was thinking about the day after he was born. November 19, 1999—his birthday—was one of those gorgeous autumn days we get here sometimes, an anomaly of a day when you only need a sweater outside, and the light manages to find the last bits of glow left in the leaves still on the trees.

But in the late morning on the day after he was born, it started snowing. Kendell had just left with Haley and Jake, and the nurses left me alone, too. So I opened the blinds and sat in the hospital bed, holding Nathan and watching it snow. It was one of the most peaceful and sweet moments of my life. It was the time when I finally got to start building our relationship, independent of everyone else wanting to hold him and admire his incredibly long hands and feet. (When he was born, his feet were already too big for those newborn baby socks, which was a hint at the rest of his life: enormous feet.)

You have a baby and you can’t help wondering…who will he be? How will he turn out? And I am starting to see it. From that incredibly sweet baby he has grown—oh my, has he grown, 6’ 2” tall already!—into a teenager, with all the accompanying stuff. Braces and homework irritations and interesting girls. He loves eating and can put down an extraordinary amount of food for someone so skinny. He likes going to the gym and lifting weights. He is an artist and spends hours drawing, with pencils and his new discovery, black fine-tip pens. He’s #25 on the basketball team. He gets really good grades and is in Honors history and English. He loves knives (this is his oldest affection…one of the first things he did when he could walk was try to get into the kitchen knife drawer) and has some impressive butterfly-knife skills. He likes skinny jeans and cotton shirts and looking nice. And right now his hair looks exactly the way he wants it.

But all of those things don’t exactly capture why I am grateful for Nathan. He was one of my life’s biggest surprises, a joyous surprise. From the second I found out I was pregnant with him (three months in already!), I had this sense of him as someone who is both fierce and gentle, and that is exactly who he is turning out to be. Fierce in his affections and dedications, sometimes in his anger. Gentle and good. He is a loyal friend and he doesn’t like when the people he cares about are upset. He inherited Kendell’s penchant for getting stuff done—if something needs to be done, he’ll do it without much complaining. He’s polite and happy and funny, and again...none of these words are really capturing it. He’s not a perfect kid of course—who would want perfection? But he is an awesome kid, and I love him so much, and I am entirely, thoroughly grateful I get to be his mom.

The only way this year's Halloween could've been better is if Jake didn't have to work so he could hang out with us and if Haley had appeared, magically, for a visit home.

Otherwise it was pretty much Halloween perfection.

My usual cheetah costume, along with the kids' usual joke about me being a cougar. ha ha.

When my bigs were little, our Halloween tradition was to trick or treat in our neighborhood, and then go to my sister Suzette’s house. My parents would be there, and my nieces and nephews. We’d eat something good and then the kids would trick or treat some more.

I loved that part of Halloween. That it was wrapped up in family, in cousins and aunts and grandparents. So many other people to see and admire costumes, and tell funny stories to, and just be with.

But when my Bigs actually grew up a little bit, this sort of got phased out, because my sisters’ youngest kids were the age of my oldest, so they grew out of Halloween before mine did.

I miss those Halloweens when we felt like a part of a tribe. We had a few lonely Halloweens of just trick or treating in our neighborhood and just hanging out at our house.

It was definitely a lot less fun.

Nathan went as the Hulk, but everyone thought he was a mutant turtle. Mom fail on the last-minute costume!

But then my sister-in-law, whose kids are nearly identical in ages to mine, moved back. And slowly we’ve started a new tradition: trick or treating in our neighborhood, and then going to Cindy’s house for dinner and more trick or treating. It is starting to feel like a new tradition, but not one I am always sure will happen, because I can’t assume she’ll want us to come every year.  So near the middle of October, I start hoping. Kaleb starts asking me, and I have to tell him, “I don’t know, we’ll have to see if Cindy invites us.” Three years in, she always has.

And I love being with family again on Halloween.

This year, my other sister-in-law, Melissa, also joined us. Everyone met at my house, and we walked around our neighborhood, trick or treating. I thought about those long-ago Halloweens while I watched Melissa’s kids, who are one and three, remembering how that felt. Having little ones on Halloween was pretty fun, but pretty exhausting, too. Being afraid that they’ll fall, or run out into the street, or get lost. This was my favorite moment this Halloween: walking on my street, seeing my neighbors and their kids, laughing with my sisters-in-law while Kaleb raced around with his cousin and friend, gathering candy. Talking to Nathan who was pushing the stroller and teasing him about whether or not he’s too tall to go trick or treating. (He decided he is.) It was the warmest Halloween I can ever remember, without any clouds, and the light was glowing through the yellow trees...sigh.

I still had roses blooming so I made the boys stand by them for a picture.

Halloween nirvana.

After our street, we packed up and drove to Cindy’s. She’d made chili and I brought my garlic bread sticks and some sugar cookies. (Because it is not a holiday meal without a dessert, even with all that candy.) I’m happy to say that I ate only one piece of candy, the Almond Joy that Kaleb gave me (his least-favorite candy happens to be one of my favorites…so convenient!)

I can’t say the same thing about the sugar cookies though. I frosted them with the browned butter pumpkin spice frosting from this recipe, instead of my usual cream cheese frosting, and oh my. They were good.

Kaleb, Jace, and Joe went out right after eating for more trick or treating, and then the adults just hung out and talked.

When I was putting away the Halloween decorations the next day, I wondered (like I always do): where will we be next year? Will anything big have changed? Will we be happier or sadder, better off or worse? I don’t know, of course. But I am certain I will hold on to the memory of this practically-perfect Halloween for many years.