Sneak Attack!

So, I started dreading the boys' first birthday at about 8 months old. For some reason, at that point I just felt like my baby boys were all grown up. As the day got closer I became a little more sad. Then it happened, they turned one, and all the dread went away. I got over it much faster than I expected. I guess I realized quickly that ONE is far from grown up and we still had plenty of moments to enjoy. Since then the boys learned to walk and I took in this milestone with delight, excited that they would no longer clean the floors of every place we entered with their palms. And, for some reason, this did not make me feel like I had lost my baby boys.
But then I took them for their first pair of sneakers. When they were non-walkers I could not wait to buy them shoes, completely suckered by all the cute pairs on market. So, the time had come and we went and the shoe buying experience was rather painless, though tiring. Ryder was more interested in escaping into the mall area by a combined travel of crawling and walking and Chase wanted to try on every pair of shoes in the store. Anyway, we bought two pair of shoes, a size 5 hunter green and black sneaker for Chase and a size 4.5 light blue and gray pair for Ryder, both of which I am pretty sure are too big for their tiny feet. (On a side note, I am not just saying that in hopes of holding onto my babies, the first time they were measured just two weeks before I was told they had tiny feet!)
As many excited kids, they wore the shoes out, and I looked at my baby boys sitting in the stroller in their new kicks and I swore I had traded in my babies for two bigger kids. Suddenly the feeling of pre-ONE swallowed me whole again and I felt like my baby boys were gone forever...literally walking forward into the big world of toddlerhood.