I woke up at 730 this morning to the sound of two boys and their miserable attempt at being “quiet”.  They should receive an A for effort, but we’ll have to work on the definition of “whispering” because I’m positive that the neighbors on either side of my house heard their early morning debate about whether to play catch in the front yard, what they’ll have for breakfast or when it was appropriate to run wild through the neighborhood. I tried to keep calm, while steadfast in my attempt to quiet them down, because if they wake the morning tornado (my daughter and their mother), only God knows what kind of wrath they might be exposed to.

After the boys were gently nudged to the main floor of the house I went to my office room and visited my blog site for the first time since February.  Per usual, life has been a bit crazy for the last few months (always is for us in January-March), so I began the process of changing the look and feel of the site (hope you like it), while my boys were downstairs and the “morning tornado” was sleeping, peacefully.  With a little bit of quiet time, I resumed doing something that I typically do every Sunday morning…I began to reflect on life.

I started to think back to decisions I’ve made, how they’ve shaped me, how I’ve found more balance in life and how I continue to learn new things about my behaviours and of those lives around me who I live and work with each day.  I’ve already mentioned that the last two months have been hectic for Deena and for me.  Like too many families, we both work full time and we have 2 Cub Scouts, 1 hockey player, 1 choir and chess prodigy and my 5 year old daughter (who is creeping up on 26).  We tend to catch funny looks from people regarding the noticeable chaos we fight through, but like my colleagues at work, I have my own family “busy season”, and we are coming out of it and I’m learning to accept it as an annual event.  Over the next two months, summer will take hold, school will be out, life will slow a bit and the world will give us a chance to recharge.

Let’s get back to that early morning reflection.  With all I have going on, the only thing that popped into my head was my car and what a sweet metaphor it was to my existing lifestyle.  As a backdrop…and in an effort to stay fiscally responsible, I bought my first used car in November.  This 2003 Ford Focus is a “gem” and as I went down the “green” path for my wife; it takes 2 weeks to burn off a tank of gas and although I resemble Fred Flintstone when jammed into the driver seat, it serves my purpose of getting to and from downtown Detroit and I don’t have a car payment, so fiscal responsibility continues.

The previous owner, friends of our family, backed this car into their garage while pulling out one day and ripped the rear view mirror from its housing.  This little cosmetic challenge, didn’t prevent me from buying the car (hell, it adds some solid battle character to the whole idea of “used car”) and without much free time in my life, I’ve continued to drive around town with the mirror “taped” together (go ahead, insert the theme song from Sanford & Son).

How did my car help me reflect?  My car made me think about my life feels like it’s being “taped” together too and no matter how busy we are or how busy we’ll continue to feel…I have to live by the philosophy of “Tuesday will follow Monday”, which is my little way of saying that life will continue roll on and everything will work itself out.  I laughed out loud about how funny my car must look, just as my life does.

In the end, though, as I’ve worked to tape my car together and my wife and I have worked to tape our family’s lives together, we make it through just fine and everyone is smiling (most of the time).  I know the time will come where things slow down and I’ll probably miss the chaos, but until then, we’ll catch our breath and off we go.

This quick little read is an homage to all families, today, who have too many items on their “to-do” list, too many places to be, too many practices to attend and too few hours in the day to get it all accomplished.  Before you put too much pressure on yourselves, do what Deena and I have done; use duck tape.  And oh yeah, if duck tape doesn’t work- buy aluminium tape, it is really strong and it looks sweet as a side view mirror housing too.