How Did This Five Year Chapter End?

People always say that time goes by faster as you get older, and I’ve certainly come to understand that it’s true. The best reason I’ve heard for that fact is that as you get older, the same amount of time represents an increasingly smaller amount of your overall life. For Crosby, a year is about 20 percent of his life. For Carlyn, that same year is almost a third of it. For me, it’s hard to believe that it’s now less that 3 percent of my life. All I can say is I hope like it doesn’t feel like it gets any faster, because it’s already crazy how fast it goes.

I don’t know about you, but I think about this from time to time, but sometimes there are major milestones that really drive the point home. This past Thursday and Friday were one of those that fit the bill.

Just over five years ago, I found that I suddenly began to gain a little weight and that I was not staying in as good of shape as I would have liked. Not so coincidentally that was also the time Crosby was born. It’s a amazing what a lack of sleep and exercise can do. Needless to say, that’s not what I wanted to write about here. The reason I bring that up is that I started doing something back then that did trigger the reason for writing this blog. I started running.

It’s not that I never ran before, but I certainly never loved running. However, back then I found a magical triple power that running with a jogging stroller provided:

I could get some exercise
Crosby could get some fresh air
Korey could get some peace and quiet.

It really was magical!

Over the past five years, I’ve probably pushed him several thousand miles in our various strollers — which is pretty amazing when I really start to think about it.

The way our work schedules typically line up, I have the kids in the morning. This is our time, and for Crosby and I it always has been. Korey went to work, and he and I ate breakfast, played, went to the park, and eventually I would run him over to day care. That’s been the routine ever since Korey went back to work.

That’s a really long intro for me to say, I really am a little sad to think that that chapter in our lives has come to an end. I really have loved that time that we spent together each day, and ensuring that we got it was always a priority for me. I don’t schedule calls then whenever possible, so that we do get that time. But kids do grow up. The little boy that used to giggle in the baby swings has become a full-on kid.

I must say though it has been a blast. As I look back, we’ve had all sorts of fun over the years. We’ve played “The Sock Game” — where the kids steal my socks and we chase each other around the house and in and out of the bouncy castle. We’ve played “The Tabby Game” — where we present that Tabby is going to get us under the covers, and we looked down under the bed to find her. We’ve played hide and seek, and danced to music like the Party Freeze Dance. We’ve also done some things outside our house too from playing with chalk, swinging on the web swing, or even Crosby’s creative version of capture the flag with an assortment of gloves.

But of all of the things that we did over those five years, nothing could ever come close to the park — or more accurately a slew of parks. The regular park, the tunnel park, the Aunt Mo park, the green park, the blue park, the YMCA park, the school park, the other school park, the spiderweb park, the new park… we went to them all!

And of course, there were games to play while we were there. The king of all games of late has been the 100 minute game. At some point, I told Crosby that we had a certain amount of time left… say “5 more minutes,” and he said “No, 100 minutes.” And so it began! We “rang the bell” by crossing the bridge at the regular park. We played tag, “The Shoe Game,” and of course everyone’s long time favorite, kick daddy while swinging on the swing. That’s one has made the kids laugh since they were old enough to do so. I slide down into rocks, and create log jams, and play tic-tac-toe. We’ve spent the equivalent of days or weeks there playing.

So getting back to the present, how did the story end? As you may have imagined, the short version is that it ended exactly how it started. Wednesday was the last regular day that I’ll have them both in the morning. Last Friday, ended truly exactly how it started — with me running and Crosby riding in the stroller on the Friday. Now I’m sure we’ll still run on the weekends and maybe again in the summer, but it is really a bit of an end of an era.

So I just soaked it in one last time. That Friday we went to the school park since the kids were still out for summer. We started with a game of tag and chasing one another. Somehow my using Turbo-mode to get away caused him to trip and fall from behind, so that brought a quick end to that game. Fortunately, I was able to redirect the sorrow into a trip over to the swings.

As we were swinging side by side, it really became one of those moments in time where you wish you could just hit pause to be able to come back to it. As a side note, it reminds me of something that the father and son would do in About Time. I’ll do the best I can to remember that moment and writing about it here will certainly help.

We couldn’t swing on the swings without playing the “Who’s little boy game?” I think today’s response was “Daddy’s little toot toot boy!”

Unfortunately, like all mornings, the time at the park needed to come to an end, but we did manage to play a quick round of one hundred minutes before we took off.

I know there will always be new and fun things to do as both kids continue to grow, but this will no doubt be something I will always cherish. And on the bright side, while I’ll certainly miss Crosby in the mornings, that will mean that Carlyn and I get to start spending some additional quality one-on-one time together which will be very welcomed.