All we got…

Over my nice Thanksgiving “break,” I was afforded the opportunity to spend time with three of the most special people in the world – Adam, Drew and Gabriela. I’m really at my happiest place when the four of us are together. It didn’t hurt that the weekend was actually full of fun activities, progress with chores, downtime to relax and enough time out of the house as in the house. So everything we do, all the hours we work, all the time away from each other is time working towards these long weekends of family togetherness. You can’t help but feel that it’s a little backwards. We spend more time away from each other, more time at our jobs, more time with people that aren’t nearly as important to us, more efforts towards tasks that ultimately mean so little in the scheme of things. How is that fair? However, if we had more time to spend with each other, would it still taste so sweet? Were we more tolerant of temper tantrums and crying fits because it’s not a part of our Monday thru Friday daily challenges? Don’t get me wrong, we get the evenings and weekends to be a family. But too frequently nights are filled with dinner, bath time and just normal routine. Weekends are jam packed with birthday parties, soccer and music classes and extended familial obligations. To have some time to just do fun things on the whim, to not be on a time schedule, to just enjoy ourselves is a rarity. It left me lingering for more, feeling like my current life just isn’t going to cut it with all this hustle and bustle. But if we had all the time in the world, would we stop appreciating it? Everyone always says to savor the time that you have with your children because they grow up so fast. It’s hard to wrap your head around that when you are too busy doing everything that is required of you. It’s hard recognizing that some of your best moments of the day with your children are when you are rushing them to and from daycare, when you are making dinner and they are “helping,” or when you’re quickly doing story time because you need to get to your “take home” work. And although we won’t always have days of uninterrupted play, and we spend more time with our coworkers than our loved ones, we have to make the most of each and every day. Because that’s all we got…