When the “It Gets Better” campaign came out, I thought to myself, “That totally applies to full-time stay-at-home parenting too!” It’s one of my mama mantras that gets me through the minute/day/week – knowing that this particular phase we’re going through with the kids won’t last forever. In fact, I’ve come to accept, and even embrace, the fact that the only sure thing about parenting is change. As soon as you get into a groove with the kids’ emotions or behavior or routine, *bam*, it all goes out the window. Baby sleeping 12-hour stretches at night? Say bye-bye to that after a week and hello again to broken sleep of 4-5 hour chunks. Toddler professing absolute love for mama and daddy today? Tomorrow, it’s “you are not my mom and I am not your friend.” There’s a flip side too, though. Such as when my 13-month-old decided to eat broccoli on his eighth try. Whoohoo! That was a fist-pump moment for sure.

However, with kids, “it” doesn’t necessarily get better as much as “it” gets different. In my three-and-a-half short years as a parent, I’ve come to learn that each stage has as many (if not sometimes more) challenges as the previous one. Yes, certain things do get better, like when you no longer need to deal with diapers. In exchange, though, you navigate public potty usage and cart around spare changes of clothes. And I often hear from my more seasoned parent friends how much they miss the early days when hurts could be hugged and kissed away, and their kids openly shared their thoughts and feelings with them. Their perspectives are important reminders for me to enjoy the moment I’m in right now, rather than wish the kids would grow up sooner.

As it is already, the kids will grow up sooner than I will like and everything will keep getting different whether I like it or not. So I’m just going to focus on how finite each moment is, and try to enjoy their differences.

My baby just turned one! How can this be? It seems like just yesterday that I was co-sleeping with him in the kids’ room, waking up every hour and a half to nurse. And now he’s standing up by himself, imitating words like “dog” and “go,” protesting his dislikes, cuddling freely, clapping during mealtimes, and laughing at his big sister’s silliness.

As all parents with more than one child say, the past year has gone by in the blink of an eye. I feel like I haven’t even had a chance to process what it means to measure my baby’s age in years instead of months. And my acute case of mama-nesia doesn’t help. For the life of me, I just don’t remember the developmental milestones of a one-year-old anymore. Good thing I’ve got my hospital-sponsored child well-being newsletters!

Seriously, though, I’m having a blast re-living all of the early stages with Nolan, and try to remember how very lucky I am to have the opportunity to do so. Just yesterday, I was able to record his second stroll pushing his walker toy. And at dinnertime for the past week, he’s been encouraging me and Syd to read with enthusiastic clapping. At one, Nolan’s favorite play activity is putting objects into containers of all shapes and sizes, including containers that aren’t meant to contain things at all! He’s developed an impressively strong throw (particularly over his playpen) and is becoming more interested in books. I catch him studying things and I like to imagine that he enjoys figuring out how things work.

At one year old, I’m beginning to catch glimpses of my little guy’s personality, and it delights and astonishes me. I can’t wait to see more of him after my next blink.