Day 20: Breathe, Seek, Play...Making Your Mark

I have many captured art work treasures of handprints, and footprints...various sizes at various ages from my precious boys. Some are in the shapes of crabs, a reindeer and a footrprint of  duck...some I've framed and hung on the wall, and some are in a pile to scrapbook.   How fast they grow up...It feels like I just brought them home and I blinked and this year they are going to be ten!  From the moment they were born they took my breath away.  How much their ten fingers and ten toes grew, looking at their little shoes and the size 4 they wear now...the more they grow the more love fills up my heart.  I look at their room, which hasn't changed much since we've moved here, other than their beds and toys.  The Noah's Ark Artwork that hung in their nursery still hangs on their walls today. Their bedspreads changed from Noah's Ark to a Jungle Quilt.  Like their handprints and footprints it is growing with them.   I used to scrub the walls, clean the crayons, matchbox cars, or whatever they used to mark up the walls.  In their room, I scrubbed so hard that I found out the "squirrel tail" was not the original paint color.  Under it was a pale yellow and then I found pink!  It was the room color the original owners had chosen for their twin girls that once lived here and then their brother took over their room after they left for college.   For many years, I was OCD about cleaning and picking up after them.  They too love to keep their room tidy and neat and no longer scratch up the walls, but they do leave their handprints all over the stairway, by the back door where they take off their shoes, in the doorways where they swing  and fly into the kitchen....it is where they have left their mark. Thomas S. Monson said “Rather than dwelling on the past, we should make the most of today, of the here and now, doing all we can to provide pleasant memories for the future…If you are still in the process of raising children be aware that the tiny fingerprints that show up on almost every newly cleaned surface, the toys scattered about the house, the piles and piles of laundry to be tackled, will disappear all too soon, and that you will, to your surprise, miss them, profoundly.”  ♥ I have chose to focus on the marks they are making and the love we are creating, that is what really takes my breath away.  I know as they grow they will continue to leave their marks on the world, whether it is a wall, or a doorway, in school, or at work....They may fade away over time, end eventually will be gone...but the Handprints they leave on my heart forever will live on!