I sometimes felt like 2012 would never end. Then, March passed and August passed and… wait.

How has New Year's Eve come and gone already? 

With 2012 just a week behind us, one year seems like quite a short while. So how exactly do you measure a year in a life?

"Seasons of Love" from the Broadway play "Rent" asks and seeks to answer that very question:

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

The song then poetically posits that one can measure a year in many non-numerical ways, such as laughter, strife, truths learned and seasons of love.

What I like most about this song is how aptly it shows that no matter how we measure a year or how quickly or slowly it seems to pass, a lot can happen in that time.

A year of experiences, both good and bad.

This week's posts will provide a glimpse into what the year 2012 held for us at Equis Place, along with some appropriate lyrics from "Seasons of Love" accompanying my personal measurements of the year.

MEASUREMENT 1:

Few events can show how meaningful a year is in the way that a child's growth can.

JMT, my niece, whose legs moved once like wet noodles is already a one-year-old who loves dancing and clapping; and Jay, my stepson, is an ever-taller ball of energy who I miss every time he's not around pretending to be a Power Ranger or pro basketball player.

As time passes, the children's faces change, their limbs grow, their achievements increase in number and they learn more with every playful exploration of this world.

It's mind-boggling to think that just-stopped-crawling baldy from my photos is my son just a year ago.

In August, Equis turned two, bearing a full head of curly, unruly hair that flies in the wind whenever he jumps over a manhole cover or runs to me at the end of the school day. Hair that he refuses for me to comb, hair that he refused for me to comb even on the day we held his small birthday party.

Now, when Equis pounces onto my belly with his 32-pound, almost 3-foot frame, it's astounding to remember how tiny he was on that seemingly long-ago day of his birth.

My son grew taller, stronger and heavier this past year, and he learned to walk with more stability and even how to lock me out of our apartment. Suddenly, that baldy from January 2012 is no more, and I expect that in another year Equis will have grown and taught me even more about time's precious value.

Most importantly, the changes the children in my life have experienced in their little years of existence remind me of the capability of people to significantly grow over the years of a lifetime and the necessity of respecting that time.

How does the growth of children in your life impact your perspective on time?