Kinda Like A Circus Act, But Not

As a mother, wife, sister, cousin, friend, part-time doctor, full-time employee and human being, I find myself struggling all too often with balance.  Balancing my personal life and my work life, my mother time with my wife time, my family time with my social time and I've yet to feel like I've been able to achieve a consistent balance.  I think that's typical though, when one thing is going well, I'm saying to another thing, "give me a minute, I'll be right there."

If my life were a circus, I'd be the highwire tightrope walking act that would be featured somewhere between motorcycles blasting at full speed inside of a steel cage act and the 80 year old riding a horse while juggling fire sticks act- not a bad place to be if you ask me.

Since this isn't a circus and I never got any highwire tightrope training, nor do I have a balance pole, I'm just tryin' to do the very best that I can with what I've got.  Today, was one of those rare opportunities, where what I got was kinda' amazing and I really feel like I had a few solid hours of individual, quality time with my younger son and that's not something I get the opportunity to do often enough.

As he and I ran up and down Target aisle and weaved our way in and out of department stores, I found myself relishing every time he waved his little sticky fingers at a charmed stranger.  And it brought me sincere happiness as we jammed out together to Journey, Dave Matthews, The Who, Natalie Cole (yep, you can legit jam out to her) and Billy Joel, while we zipped around town, going every which-a-way and not looking back.  I didn't mind one bit that his agenda was to stay two-baby steps in front of me at all times or that he distracted me to the point of having to make 2 Target trips in 3 hours, because it was worth it to have these moments- that are definitely too short and sometimes too far between.

Here's a recap of how we spent the afternoon (please excuse the cell phone pictures):

He gets his fascination with mirrors from my side of the family; if there's a mirror, my family's all up in it.

Ahhh, I cannot imagine the day when he will really need a book bag to go off to kindy-garten.  Serious tears will be shed.

Lovely to meet you...

looks like there's a fuzzy in between your toes, let me get that for you.

Favorite part of the day for me: watching Arden play hide and go seek in the rack of white Ralph Lauren pants.
Worst part of the day for the store employee: watching Arden play hide and go seek in the rack of white Ralph Lauren pants.