I always find it hard this time of the year not to go all crumbly and soft and shed tears of nostalgia and reminisce.

My boys are Feb boys and this time of the year each one of the boys adds one more candle to the cake and I’m always an emotional wreck.

I have penned many such entries every February as a mother because there’s just too much emotional flooding not to write and get it out.

Nat turned SEVEN on 20th and Ben turned TEN on 26th. I cannot believe that it is double digits now for my firstborn. Has it really been a decade already since I’ve mothered this child?

Both the boys are sassy and smart (and sometimes smart-mouthed) and they are growing up so fine, I find it hard to believe so many years have gone by. Nat is learning to navigate the forays of formal schooling, making new friends and discovering his interests.

Along the way we’ve found out he’s got a nasty temper when pushed and can really immerse in name-calling so much so you don’t want to piss him off and rub him the wrong way. He gets especially annoyed when his clean and neat and organised private spaces have been compromised by his siblings, or if I gave instructions to make everyone pack that included him because that to him is grossly unfair – he is the most organised child of the lot, so he thinks!

We’ve grown to learn that this boy does have fangs. Hurhurhur.

The other one, my beloved firstborn, is 10 this year and I would never have imagined him being almost as tall as me now and weighing so much that I can’t, for all the strength in me, lift him even a quarter inch off the floor. I know someday he will stand taller than me, which I need to prepare myself mentally for. This boy frustrates me to no end with his quirks (think farts and burps and the ‘floss’) but at the same time lets me in to his world with all that’s trending including fortnite dances, lame jokes, unfiltered language and everything he loves as a boy. I am just afraid I will not have him as a boy very soon and the thought of seeing him as a croaking, pimply teen is making me cry a little every morning when fb invites me to revisit my memories. I see all those cute little chubby Ben faces and I’m not joking, I really lay in bed to cry.

Boys, if you are reading this some day, know that mama has had a hard hard time adjusting to you guys growing up so fast and maybe that’s why sometimes she’s a little lunatic and emo on days you just don’t get her.

Those times you got frustrated not knowing why your mama was like that? Yea. Cos she also has got bad, bad separation anxiety she basically couldn’t function.

She too, has to grow, little by little, to accept that you boys will someday grow up to be fine young men and that she no longer can hold you both like the babies she used to squish.