My morning alarm, Adil my ten month old, goes off around 6am in the morning. About ten minutes later Zain my 3 year old jumps on top of me with enough energy to fuel a monster truck. Incidentally, somehow a toy truck has ended up under the duvet! And so the day begins. Breakfasts are made, diapers are changed, nap times, groceries, cooking, laundry, and mental to do lists. As a parent of two children under four, it’s a continuous treadmill until 7pm when all goes quiet and I collapse on the couch trying to figure out where the day went and what exactly I accomplished!

My brother, Omar, is visiting us these days and is helping to appease the daily chaos. He has just graduated from university and when I look at him I can’t believe how fast time has gone by. Twelve years my junior, and six years younger than my middle sibling, he’s always been the baby of our family. Now, he’s a foot taller than me, about to start his first job, and it doesn’t seem all that long ago that he was riding his scooter around my parents’ home or ruining my mothers plants in his quest to be the next Imran Khan.

Feeling like this about a younger sibling, I can only imagine what my parents must be going through to see their last child graduate after parenting us for the majority of their lives. I look at Zain and Adil and realize that I need to slow down and enjoy this because if Omar is any indication of how fast time flies, soon I’ll be looking back through the rosy lens of nostalgia missing this hectic but adorable phase.

Definitely easier said than done. How exactly do you slow down when you’re daily routine revolves around their survival? The key is to accept that life as a parent of young children is going to be exhausting but when you do have a chance to take them to the park, sit down and play a game with them, or build a magnatile rocket, be a hundred percent in the moment. Don’t be thinking of the number of minutes left on the timer so you can get them changed or fed. Don’t be playing distractedly with your iphone or checking FB status of people you barely know. Don’t be making plans of the things you need to get done the following day. The beauty and sometimes frustrating thing about young children is they don’t have any concept of time. They’re in the moment and if you can make a conscious effort to tear yourself away from all those distractions, parenthood becomes a lot more enjoyable. Those ten or fifteen minutes interspersed through the day can make a huge difference.

Zain is currently flying his rocket around the living room. I’m taking it in with a smile.   He’s going too fast and it’s about to ram into a wall. I tell him to slow down. “No, not slowing down, faster, faster, faster!” he shouts.

Yes, faster he will go, it’s me that needs to slow down…