Change

Change is inevitable. It's a part of life. How you accept it is up to you.
My parents recently bought a new house (after 5 1/2 years of looking!). Needless to say, it's a good change. It is a beautiful house with plenty of space and a park like backyard (where the boys feed the resident squirrel a gourmet meal every morning and ride scooters in the evening). It's nice to be able to go to sleep at night in a queen sized bed (opposed to a twin bed), without having to worry about gun shots and drug deals going on a block away.
Knowing you're getting older is a natural change but it's not always easy. Because getting older means that you watch those around you get older as well. Rob and I have both had to help our parents with every day tasks because their bodies can no longer accomplish the task easily. Even watching our boys get older is difficult at times. I'd like to think of E as our baby but the truth is that he is becoming a "big boy". Yesterday I took the boys to a community pool, where E was not allowed to wear his floaties. I was nervous because P wanted to swim on one side of the pool and E was in a shallow part that would gradually grow deep enough that he couldn't stand unassisted. The lifeguards weren't the most observant so I was constantly keeping an eye on each boy. Needless to say, my lil athlete decided that he was going to embrace this change and teach himself how to swim. By the end of the afternoon he was swimming a short distance under water without any assistance. He was so proud of himself and would yell, "Mom, I just popped up!" when he'd resurface.
A week from today I will be teaching again for the first time in almost 4 years. It's a change that I felt ready for but it'll be a new norm for us. I'll only be teaching part time but it means getting both boys ready and out the door at 8am, doing cleaning and grocery shopping in between work and picking P up from school, fitting my photography in around my new work schedule, correcting papers after the boys are in bed at night.
Another change I not only implemented but embraced this Summer was being content with the small things. Usually, P and I make a Summer bucket list of all the things we want to do. This Summer we didn't do that. We still had fun but we didn't do something big every day, nor did we spend a lot of money on activities as we've done in the past. We took the boat out, went to CA to visit my parents, got to stay with friends in Reno, went to the aquarium, swam a lot, saw a few movies, had a couple sushi dates and spent time with friends at various parks. But it was a low key Summer compared to years past. And the nice thing about this change? P became content. When we did something "big" he was happy but he was also content building Legos, riding his scooter, playing Monopoly, running through the sprinklers and reading his Magic Treehouse books.
So, change can be good or bad, depending on how you embrace it. I've always been ok with change (for the most part) but I know that some change is not always easy. It's an inevitable part of life, though, so it is what it is. How do you embrace change?