Life can feel so disjointed. I’ve been rather silent here for a plethora of reasons but one is that time is so segmented; never lending itself to the completion of any one task let alone a single thought. It’s not any one thing – it never is – but rather an assortment of circumstances that get fed into the old funnel and spit out the nasty truth that things these days happen little by little or not at all.

It all feels like a tag-team effort; two hands meeting in the air as one parent steps out and the other steps in. Willy and I were just talking about our dear friends who seemingly spend so much time together doing mundane things, like picking up their kids from school. We were laughing thinking about how unrealistic things like that are for us nowadays. We’re always trading or handing off, but so rarely get time all together anymore. Which seems baffling considering we both work predominantly from home. One would think that the time we spend together would be abundant.

The struggle to find a balance – regardless of what it is your balancing – is always real. For us, it’s managing a household of three young boys that all require an abundance of attention in addition to managing a growing business where the needs and demands are ever-changing.

I read the Bernstein Bear books to the kids often, just as my mom read to my sister and I when we were young. Reading them now, as a mother, brings them into a whole new context and I find that my entire tone changes when I read mama bear’s part in the book as if to highlight the fact whatever struggle we’re reading about – being kind and polite, keeping a clean house, lying about something that happened, watching too much TV etc – is indeed a similar, if not the same, struggle we just experienced in our own home. In any event, I channeled Mama Bear when I insisted that we all get out out of dodge for spring break and spend sometime away from home, work, and with each other.

We spent Easter with Willy’s side of the family and then booked it up to Payson, Arizona. A small, rink-a-dink town that I’m sure has a killer rodeo at some point in the year and perhaps the biggest Wal-Mart I ever did see. I wouldn’t say it was the end all, be all; the struggles of parenting are there no matter where you are, but it was nice to have a change of scenery. Even, if for nothing more, that wondrous hour in the car when all the kids are asleep, your favorite music is on in the background, the road ahead seems to go on forever, and the you can actually talk to the man you love.