O my family,
small collection of noise and need,
you rise with the sun and scatter crumbs
like evidence of joy.
You
one year old,
still learning the grammar of the world,
speaking in hands and eyes,
teaching me that love begins
before language ever arrives.
You
two years old,
all insistence and wonder,
a will made of lightning,
testing gravity, patience, and mercy
with the same fearless devotion.
You
four years old,
already carrying stories in your pockets,
asking why, asking how,
tilting the future toward yourself
without even trying.
And you, my husband
steady ground beneath the beautiful chaos,
the calm that answers the cry at night,
the laugh that reminds me
we are still ourselves inside all of this.
You build a home not with walls
but with presence.
Together, you make a life
measured not in hours
but in nappies, bedtime songs,
shared glances over tired smiles,
in the way love keeps multiplying
no matter how thin the day stretches.
This is not a quiet love.
It is sticky, loud, interrupted.
It forgets where the keys are.
It wakes too early.
It keeps going anyway.
O my family
you are the work and the reward,
the reason time feels both endless
and unbearably brief.
If this is what it means to be full,
then I am.
Emilie Turner 