One Year

I am sitting here listening to the gentle noises of a sleepy city: honking cars, passing buses, airplanes flying overhead, the distant sound of music (if you can call it that) and a girl singing as she walks down the sidewalk.

Um, you there! Yes, you down on the sidewalk! Up here, 3rd story? Yeah, I don't know if you knew this but....your singing is really terrible. No really. You aren't on key at all. And it's 9:35 at night and you're...loud. See you.

Moving on. I was thinking yesterday about how fast time is flying. I swear it didn't go this fast when I was a child. It took about 2 years to get to Christmas time or my birthday. Each day was like a week and a month...like a year at least! But these days, I blink and a year has gone by.

So bear with me while I reminisce for a moment, please. One year ago Ben got back from spending over 2 months in Turkey. Crazy. I remember the butterflies in my stomach as the day of his homecoming grew closer and closer. It could've been that I had to drive to O'Hare for the first time or it could've been nerves (nerves?) at seeing my husband again after a whole summer. Will he have changed? Will I have changed? Will we know how to talk anymore after having only skyped for 9 weeks? ;)

I cleaned all three of us up (the boys and I) and left for the airport too early. We sat there for awhile with another wife waiting for one of Ben's friends who traveled with him. We waited for the long, long customs lines to go down and then all of the sudden the other wife screamed her husband's name and leaped OVER the chairs and went running to him. My heart started pounding and I was turning around every which way trying to figure out what was happening. There were these 2 guys walking towards us. One was a tall skinny young man with a teenager-ish looking mop of hair on his head and a stubbly growth on his face. My eyes flitted past him and then zoomed right back again. It was Ben sporting a nice Turkish haircut and a weight loss of 20lbs.

I look back at the picture now and realize how BABY my boys were. Samuel was barely 3 years old and Zakkai was only 18 mos old. Ben couldn't believe how much Zakkai had changed while he was gone. One of the boys started crying at the sudden chaos and then we were reunited as a family.

It took several days to get used to being around each other again and for me to believe that he was really home again. It was a really wonderful special time. You learn to appreciate each other all over again.

And since that time SO much has happened to us as a family. Ben finished a heavy load of classes, took his comps, I broke myself:), Z turned 2, Ben had surgery, proposed his dissertation, S turned 4, B started teaching and a million other things. A year. Where did it go? I know we'll look back on this time of sacrifice and hard work with fondness. A special time for our little family. And who knows what'll happen in this next year...