Life choices

Whoever Dr. Wayne Dyer is, he's been quoted as saying "Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made." I agree with that statement and would even expand on it by saying we make some of those choices through planning, while other choices we allow to be made for us as a result of lack of planning.

I've always been a planner. I set a goal and figure out how to achieve it. Some of those goals have changed over the years, and my planning has adapted accordingly.

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Robert Burns. He's the poet who penned, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

How else do you explain a day like yesterday? It started with an argument with Sydney. She wanted to wear her new big girl underwear with the Little Mermaid on them, but - God forbid - I'd picked out a pair featuring Dora the Explorer. What was I thinking?

I made it to work where I was faced with critically important issues such as inserting proper click tags in a series of online ads so that newspaper websites could accurately measure how many people clicked on our client's ads.

Really.

An hour of my life is gone. I will never get it back. All so that these media organizations can - at the end of the month - report that - if lucky - three people clicked on the ad and were linked to the client's website. Pardon my cynicism, but this is information that should have been provided to us. It's only because my art director and I wasted several more hours of our lives on this same issue last year that we knew to ask now, rather than try to fix later.

The question led to a flurry of phone calls and e-mails throughout the day. With the end-of-day deadline drawing near, I again called the client to see what had been learned. Imagine my surprise to learn she'd e-mailed me the information an hour earlier. Wonderful. Our e-mail wasn't working. Desperate to leave to pick up the kids, I gave her my home e-mail address, which I can access remotely.

Guess what! It wasn't working either.

Right about that time, Jeff decided to stop in for a surprise visit before he headed to work. And I barely had time to say hi.

I should have been running out the door to pick up the kids from daycare, and instead I was stuck at work trying to figure out how to insert a single line of "code" into an online ad... an ad that even if we figured out how to fix it we wouldn't be able to send to the client because our e-mail wasn't working.

So where exactly did my planning go awry? Was it choosing to have kids? Choosing to continue working a full time job after having kids? Choosing to work four 10-hour days rather than five 8-hour stints? Choosing to live the lifestyle we do, which requires me to earn a full time income?

Days like this make me think something's gotta give, and I sure hope the "something" isn't my sanity. How do other moms do it?

To borrow a phrase from another client, guess it's time for me to pull up my big girl underwear. It's time I focus on the many blessings in my life... such as the husband who loves me enough to make a special stop to see me despite a job filled with crisis that actually matter... and the son who ran across the classroom and wrapped his arms around my waist excitedly shouting "Mom-my!" when I finally got to school to pick him up... and the sweet little girl who interrupted me a few minutes ago to climb into my lap for a hug saying, "I just want a snuggle."

When I think about it, if life is a series of choices, I'd say my choices have been pretty close to perfect.