Thursday, August 19, 2004

The Time Not Crunch

Any family with kids today can tell how hard it is to keep up with everything going on. Parents have jobs, kids have school and day care, and both may have activities. In addition, the groceries need to be bought, yards mowed, the house cleaned up, any pets cared for, and trips made to the Home Depot or Loews in order to get the latest thing to be installed or used to fix what's broken.

It is, in short, damn hard to make all that fit in to your lunch hour, time off after work, and the weekend. Oh, and of course, you'd like to do something fun as a family once in a while as well. If your spouse is a stay-at-home mom, then all that is much easier. She does it. But if you both work, well...

Until you become the stay-at-home spouse.

I tell you, the change in our lives once I had settled in to taking care of some of the housecleaning, the grocery shopping, and getting to do the other errands during the day while my son was at school and my wife at work was amazing.

When Jake got home from school, I was there to be with him. The animals had been taken to and from the vet already, the groceries were in the fridge, the errands done. It was so totally great. The time after school and work and the weekend available for us to be together and enjoying ourselves expanded immensely. It wasn't like stolen moments in between jobs. It was full, relaxed, and more enjoyable.

The dogs even got a walk. And the house was cleaner. And I got to blog. Pretty cool.

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