Hello, beautiful butterflies. Welcome to this week's flying higher moment. Over the holidays,

I found myself feeling sad and reminiscing about when my oldest children, who are now in their

20s and 30s, were younger. I was remembering Christmases in the past and all the fun things

that we did. We would have an annual cookie bake with our cousins.

I hosted Christmas Carol parties with the neighborhood children and church friends.

We had a church home where we could celebrate Christmas Eve with concerts and skits and

carol singing and candlelighting. And I felt sad remembering all of these things and how

different my life is right now. In and how different my life is right now.

In many ways, my life is better now, but it's also very different.

And I think the thing that I was grieving the most were those little children who were my first ones.

They're all grown up now, and some have children of their own.

And I was remembering their small faces and small

hands and small bodies that I love to hug and hold and sing to. This Christmas, I had two children

who did not come home to celebrate with us, and maybe that's part of why I was so sad. Also, the

reasons that they didn't come home were painful reasons for me.

And so I grieved that as well. I found myself thinking a lot about how much I wished I could

just go back for one more day and really be present and experience their little selves again.

The good that came out of this grief was that I more intentionally focused on being

present for the kids that I do still have at home. My youngest is almost 13, and my 14-year-old

is right now going through that phase where in one short year they morph

from being a big awkward looking kid to being a young man. I was watching him in the kitchen this

morning and I thought one day in the not too distant future, I will be having those same sad thoughts about these kids too.

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