Oh, nostalgia.  It came for a visit today when all I wanted to do was to put the laundry away.  The baby is almost four months old and it was time to move through the newborn clothes to the next size up.  I had a box ready to put the old away in, to get it ready to be sold at the next baby items consignment sale.  I didn't realize it would be so hard. 

It wasn't just Aidan's clothes.  It was a combination of both all the new items I had bought for him and the best of the best of his older brother's outfits from almost four years earlier.  When I put my older son's clothes in a box four years ago, I knew I was safekeeping them, storing them for the next bundle of boy that I innately knew would eventually bless my little life. 

But, this time, it was different.  There aren't going to be any more babies in this house, and I am likely to never see these tiny onesies and rompers again.  They are getting boxed up to depart forever and I was torn.  Each piece has a memory.  I can't, for the life of me, recall what exact memory goes with each piece.  I simply have this fuzzy little notion that goodness, joy, and love are somehow interwoven in each outfit.  Like the blue sleeping gown that both of my sons wore.  It looked so good against their blue eyes, those extra-long lashes, I just couldn't put it in the box.  Nothing special happened when they wore this gown, but I had to keep it.  I knew there was something about it.

Maybe it was on their little bodies when I fell in love with them.  Maybe they wore it when I whispered in their ears for the first time that I'd die for them.  Maybe I spent twenty minutes trying to spot treat either poop or throw-up on it in the middle of one night, realizing for the first time that all my labor is well worth it.  I don't know which one of these things it might have been.  May have been all of them.  Maybe none of them.  But I plan on keeping that gown. 

It is a symbol of love only a parent knows, a piece of time that will remain precious even when I am old and alone.  And now, the gown has a new meaning.  Not of the perfect and small bodies that once were clothed in it, but of the realization that being a parent comes with a price.  That at some point in time, whether we like it or not, we have to say goodbye.  Not to everything, but most of it.