I am in a wonderfully FULL season of life. It’s a different kind of full than when I had a bunch of little ones underfoot. I still do have a little one, but mostly big kids who have their own stuff going on. My four biggest are in school all full time this year, and while that might sound like I have loads of time on my hands, I am lucky to get an hour of quiet when the morning chaos, cleaning, to-do’s, and putting the baby down for a nap before it’s time to start picking up the big kids. From there it’s a constant state of running around to and fro, getting dinner ready, cooking, cleaning up, doing homework, and getting ready for bed. It might not sound like a lot, but… it’s a lot.

Mr. Miller and I joke that we know God has a great sense of humor when he sent us a toddler at the same time we’d be navigating teenagers. For the first year or two of the baby’s life, I wondered how I would be able to manage it all – but sometimes when my older kids are all off doing something, and Banks is on my hip asking for snacks or a dinosaur show, I am so full of gratitude to be in this exact stage of mothering I’m in. I can’t imagine doing anything else in my life than exactly this.

I’ve been a mama long enough now to know that each stage passes before you know it, and that there is a season for everything. This might not be my season for building an empire, but it sure is a season to build my legacy. When life gets busy, or when I think I’m falling short, I try to zoom out to when all my kids are grown and think of how they will remember these years. Laundry machines always churning, nightly dinner around the table, playing basketball together in the driveway, family walks to the snow cone shack, loading up in the too-small SUV for Saturday morning sports, Sunday dinners with grandparents, a mom aways around to talk to… and I know it will be okay. I know I am enough.