Bring on the Sun

The snow falls slowly outside my window as I grip my warm coffee cup in the quiet of my kitchen.  Although it is March 3rd, winter is hanging on a bit longer; but in my mind I am already escaping into the sunshine of summer.  I glance at my calendar to organize in my mind the events of the day -- my daughter needs to be to a friend's house at 10 am, my son to baseball camp at 2 pm, and then I need to assist him in getting "handsome" for the winter formal he is attending tonight.  As I turn the pages of the calendar, I notice that the summer months are already filling fast.  I have put all of my son's baseball games on the calendar and am anxiously awaiting a schedule of my daughter's softball games.  We have planned some important family events as well.  Among others, we have scheduled our annual family outting to Chuck E Cheese in LaCrosse for Sunday, March 18th.  This has been a tradition in our family since the kids were very little.  My husband takes off milking and we spend the entire day together as a family before my husband dives into the frenzy of spring field work.  We have also scheduled our family summer vacation already.  A few weeks ago, the kids and my husband and I scanned the web for tickets to baseball games this summer.  We need to fit our family vacation in between baseball and football season to avoid too many conflicts.  We are planning to attend major league baseball games again this year ... our favorite type of family vacation!  This year we purchased tickets to both a Kansas City Royals game and a St. Louis Cardinals game.  Our route will take us to Kansas City and then across Missouri to St. Louis so that we can view both teams in both stadiums.  (We will be able to cross two baseball stadiums off of our bucket list this year! Woo hoo!) 

In our family, I am the planner.  I am adamant about setting aside time for family.  I have learned that life is busy and if we just fly through life thinking "someday I will do this" and "someday we will do that" we will end up looking back to find that we never did the things we had wished we could do.  I know that if we wait until we are in the heat of the moment, amid the summer rush, we will never be able to step back and find the time to plan our vacations and times together.  That is why we do it already in February or March -- to get it on the calendar before the calendar takes over our lives!!    

I learned this lesson from a coworker and friend who recently retired.  She would have classes centered around balancing work and family and she would use the following analogy.  She would physically bring along a large jar as well as a number of big rocks of various sizes and a bag of fine sand.  She would explain that the big rocks are the important items in our lives that we want to make priority.  The sand is all of the other things in our lives that, although they may be important, they are not our biggest priorities.  She would then explain how if we fill up the jar with the sand first, then there is absolutely no room for any of the big rocks.  However, if we carefully place the big rocks into the container first, then we can still fit a lot of the sand into the jar in the cracks between the rocks.  I have never forgotten this analogy and am grateful that I learned it!  So, with my rocks firmly in place and literally on my calendar, I am ready to hit the summer running ... so bring on the sun!!