My babies, all growing up

Charlie turns one this week.  Am I the only one who has trouble believing that?  But even though I am amazed at how much he has grown in the last year (and I will post about that in a couple of days), I have also been thinking a lot about how much Violet has grown since then.

I had always planned to space my kids about 2 years apart.  Closer than that I considered crazy, but 2 years seemed comfortable for me.  That's about how far my siblings are spaced, and Brandon and I agreed before we had kids (haha, we thought we knew about kids before we had them) that it was good to have them closer together so they wouldn't get too comfortable being the only or youngest child and have a hard transition when the baby came.  So Violet and Charlie are 2 years and 2 months apart, and the only reason for the extra 2 months is that I wanted to space out the birthdays.  Yes, I'm fickle like that.


But I've been looking at pictures of Charlie's birth and instead of thinking, "Wow, he was so tiny!" I think, "Oh my gosh, Violet was a baby!  How on earth did I have kids this close together?"  And while I really did love having the kids that close together, in retrospect, I think I was a little crazy.  Violet was barely talking.  She was still in diapers for almost a year after he was born.  She had no idea about basic newborn safety.  And most of all, she gave up napping right after he was born. When I look back I think, what possessed me to think this was a good idea?

Then I see them together and I think, Nevermind.  This was a great idea.