My first time.

That title may have been just a smidgin misleading.  Oops.

I've been thinking about firsts a lot lately.  This past couple of weeks has been filled with them.  Today I took both kids to the library, and then to the grocery store for the first time.  I'm also cooking my first dinner as a mother of two.  By the way, thanks to all the wonderful family members who made it possible for me to wait almost 2 whole weeks before I had to cook a single meal.  That was pretty awesome.  I'm also sick for the first time as the mother of a newborn, something that I never experienced with my first.  Oh, and my daughter told us she wanted to poop in the potty.  And then she did.  For the first time.  It was life changing.

The thing with firsts, is that they're magnificent.  And terrifying.  They incite incredible amounts of anticipation, fear, excitement, a vast myriad of emotions.  But soon, these things will happen a second time.  And a fifth.  And a seven hundredth.

A first kiss is something you remember forever.  You tell your friends about it.  You blush when it crosses your mind in the middle of work the next day.  But some kiss you get on a Tuesday morning from the man you've been with for almost 10 years?  Still nice, but generally speaking not the kind of thing you'll tell stories to your grandchildren about.

Over the next months and years, the firsts from this week will all become the mundane, repetative parts of my life.  I'll take the kids shopping, frequently wishing I could have come alone.  I'll cook a million mediocre dinners.  I'll change hundreds more diapers.  But then one day, I'll also have a last.

It seems now that I've probably already changed my daughter's last diaper.  Something I did over and over, every day for over 2 years, and it's done forever.  And because it was a last, not a first, I didn't actually KNOW it was the last.  Such a huge, monumental adjustment in our lives and I didn't even know it happened.

One of these days, I'll be done changing my son's diapers too.  I'll take them to the grocery store for the last time.  I'll cuddle them in my lap for the last time.  I'll have one last kiss from the man I've already been with for almost 10 years.  And just like now, I will have no idea that it happened.  None of these things will feel special, my mind will categorize them among the 5000 other times, not set apart, like a first.

Depressing, right?  SERIOUSLY.

I'd love to say that knowing this fact will make me appreciate every single mundane experience of every single day of my life.  But that's baloney, and we all know it.  I know it's baloney, because I'm taking things for granted even as I write this.  It's part of the human condition, it's impossible to avoid.  I guess what we can do is live a little bit more in the now.  Spend today basking in today's blessings, even when today's blessing want to feel like trials and curses.  Because one day, one day probably very soon, those blessings will be memories.  And at the very least, I want to make sure those memories stick.