[…I’m a week late in posting this — unfortunately my blog time has been cut in half!  But I’m hoping to update it at least once a week from here on out.]

You won’t usually see me in photos — let’s just say I’d prefer to stay behind the camera.  However, after Dhara was born, I started thinking that for posterity’s sake, I needed to be purposeful in being in the occasional family photo, like here and here.  Even though I dislike being in photos, I think it’s important that my children have photos of us together.  I want them to have photos of a young mama with her young kiddos.  There’s something beautiful about seeing a picture of your parents when they were young parents.  I want to make sure that in all the hustle and bustle of this life, my kids have a few pictures of me to look back on — even if it means only once or twice a year like Mother’s Day and Christmas.

Mother’s Day this year was pretty swell.  It started off on Saturday with Greg’s parents coming into town and cooking us an amazing meal of grilled barbeque and teriaki chicken, grilled steak, grilled pork tenderloin, beans, quinoa, cornbread, lemon meringue pie, cherry pie and a large bowl of delicious fruit.  What a blessing that was!  Thank you Dad and Mom, it meant so much to us!

On Sunday (Mother’s Day), we ended up staying home from church because the boys have been really fussy due to gas.  Greg let me get a few hours of rest while he watched the boys — a real treat since sleep is so hard to come by these days!  I was also given the gift of an awesome, awesome retro pistachio colored Kitchen Aid Artisan stand mixer.  And lastly, my darling husband and daughter got the garden ready for this year’s small crop — there was no way I could do it with the twins this year.

love how my little busy bee, dhara, is perched on the edge of the garden bed

[If we’re friends on Facebook, you may have noticed my love for Instagram.  Been using it everyday since I got the app a couple weeks ago — it’s such a great way to capture life everyday, because for the most part I don’t have a camera handy, but I do have a cell phone!  Love it!]

Mother’s Day got me thinking…  In the 4 years we’ve been married, we’ve been blessed with three children.  I always wanted kids, a large family even.  However I must say that child rearing is hard — the hardest thing I’ve ever done — and my kids are young, all two and under!  The challenges only get bigger from here on out.  Motherhood means laying my life down for them on a daily basis — not an easy task!  It takes discipline and selflessness.  And yet, there’s a joy that comes when I look at my children, even though I know life isn’t easy.  There’s a love that grows for them every single day.

I feel so blessed to be called a mother, and be given such a cool and out-of-this-world-rewarding job to care for these little treasures. [2011, 2010].