With her vibrant colors, birdsong, and promise of warmer days ahead, Spring in New England is such a refreshing and uplifting transition. As parents, transitions are constant and can be refreshing, challenging, and bittersweet. They give us powerful and profound reminders of the passage of time.

We shepherd ourselves and our children through countless physical and emotional mini transitions daily. Outings and obligations outside the house, in and out of car seats, sleep times, baths, meals, play-dates, big feelings, sibling disputes, each day brings so many shifts of our energy and attention.

Our children are constantly evolving and transitioning throughout their lives. From the early days in our wombs when we compare their size to different fruits, to transitioning Earth-side as a newborn, to learning to crawl, walk, and talk, they change so quickly in those early years! Eventually, they go to school, loose their first tooth, claim more independence, learn to read, go through puberty. The transitions are big, profound, and dramatic.

And of course, we, too, are constantly evolving along our parenting journey in big and profound ways. We grow a human inside ourselves and transition from an individual to a dyad as we labor and birth life into the World. We experience a whole new bodily function as we start lactating and learn how to feed our babies with our bodies. We wean those babies. We are confronted with memories and experiences of our own childhoods through the eyes of our kids and with a new lens as a parent. And apart from parenting, as individuals we are, of course, going though transitions at work, in our friendships, our marriages, our families of origin. We grow grey hair and wrinkles, go through peri-menopause, read new books, develop new skills, passions, and pursuits.

To be a Child, a Parent, simply to be a Human in this World is to bear witness and experience transitions continuously. May we move through them with the grace and vital energy of Spring.

Warmly,

Dr. Lizzie