Though parenting young children can be the most demanding of seasons in a person’s life, it is also a time that our minds return to with an increasing fondness as the years pass.
Sarah Condon writes an essay on The Work Of Love which is parenting:

It is hard to recognise that you are in the sweetest time of your life when you are in it. People often say to young parents that “the days are long, but the years are short.” They are right. In a very short time my children will be adolescents, and then teenagers, and then I will have one very quiet house. I know that there are happy years beyond these. But for some holy reason, these are the years we return to in our memories, even decades later. I am convinced that the work of love we do stays with us no matter how much time has past.

Sarah Condon, Churchy, Mockingbird, 2016, pg 59.