I see the days falling away as my eldest child grows and changes and matures and we get closer to the end of babyhood for the littlest one. I feel a low level of stress – almost like I’ve got to meet a deadline I am unprepared for. In the little moments with each of my boys I wonder how much I’ll remember of this time… The urge to somehow capture it all consumes me, as in my mind I desperately repeat phrases, questions and gestures in an attempt to keep them all close.

How soon Arlo has moved into boyhood, how incomprehensible is the size of his heart and his emotional mind. He’s taking on so much; the reflective and absorbent brain and its trillion firing synapses such a wonderful, beautiful thing to witness. And how careful one must be right now – the evidence of influence so obvious as his vocabulary expands and so too his understanding of the life he leads, and that which surrounds him.

And since recognising this desire to keep something tangible, to catch the words and even the actions and store them somehow outside of me so that they are real, I have made peace with the reality that it is unnecessary to burden my heart with such a task. Instead I realise now that I must just “be” in every single second I spend in the presence of both my boys, so that each special moment is engraved upon me, burned beautifully into my soul for all of eternity.