The work can wait...

It's been a few weeks since post #3 - lapsing into my poor posting behavior?  Probably. But during this time, we had our first week of family vacation.  Cullen's employer is generous with holidays and  gives three days around the fourth of July so he takes the week to do something with the kiddos.  In our seven summers together, this is the first time I joined them. We have always taken our lake vacation the last week in June so it was too challenging to take more than five of my ten vacations days in less than a month. Why so challenging? True that summer is a popular vacation time so it was always a balance with co-workers for coverage.  But the longer I am away from my job outside the home, the more I see how tied to work I was and that too often it was me making the decision the work could not wait.

One of my first bosses would end each day at about the same time, wiping her desk clean saying, "The work will be here tomorrow." She would head to dinner or an off-Broadway play or something similarly exciting as I would sit at my desk writing another story, creating a list of "things to do" or spending too much time reworking the headline of a story nobody would remember five minutes after they read it. Early in my career, I called it working to get ahead but 15+ years later, I was still scrambling to finish a plan, returning to work too soon after maternity leave because "the team needed me" to finish the 'important' project, hauling my kiddos into the office for a meeting on President's Day - my day off -  because the client couldn't wait, ...  It was ALL important. Well, here's the 20/20 of the hindsight, there isn't one detail of that list that couldn't wait another day.

Now my list includes laundry, dishes, dusting...an endless list of household tasks but guess what?....

The work can wait.  This guy will not. :)