Another 271 weekends of childhood and it’s over…

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Life is great, but man is it flying by. Nowhere is that more evident than when I take a second to stop and look at my son Adrian. We were playing last weekend, and I looked down at those little legs that have always been so small and skinny, and the kid’s legs looked like they had grown a foot overnight. He’s growing so fast now that it’s startling sometimes to see.

Last Thursday I had another one of those surreal moments as a father that made me step back a minute and pause.  It was a small thing, but it’s made me laugh a few times since. Last Thursday Adrian and I worked out at New Braunfels Crossfit as usual where he’s been going with me for a couple of months now in preparation for basketball camp, as I wrote about in a previous post last month. We had a pretty challenging workout that day that included a lot of running. Adrian smoked me that day beating me by about a minute to finish the workout because he can run like the wind. As I came in at the end, he gave me that look like “I got you old timer.”  

It was another one of those moments that made me pause and realize, man this thing is moving really fast. No, not me at forty years old running 800 meters in the rain, but the fact that my son is growing up. This whole time while I’m wrapped up in working, studying, learning, my son is growing up in front of me.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had these types of revelations. In fact, this really started hitting me in graduate school as I was putting in 80 hour weeks between work and going back to school. I didn’t take any time off in 2014 and 2015. Basically, I worked for two years straight just grinding it out, trying to get school done as quickly as possible.

During that program, we completed an exercise that is often called a 360 Feedback exercise. This was basically a chance for all of us in our cohort to sit down and have an honest discussion about what we viewed as each of our strengths, and each of our weaknesses. It’s incredible how close you can get to people when you’re going through graduate school together. Anyways, during that exercise, I received some of the most impactful feedback I’ve ever received.

The big takeaway that day from my class of what was my biggest weakness was that I was moving way too fast and not enjoying the process.  They spoke first of how motivated and dedicated I was to the goals I set as a positive, which was great feedback in itself, but it was the weakness that was so eyeopening to me.  Their feedback on my biggest blind spot was that I was so focused on finishing my goals that I never stopped to enjoy the journey towards those goals.

It was at that moment I realized that not only was that true but the most significant area that I was not taking time to enjoy the journey was with my son. I was missing a lot of his most valuable years because I was so focused on getting other things done so that I could be more successful for him. While time flew by and I sacrificed time with him.  Time I’ll never get back.

So I decided to do something about it. On that day, I decided that I was going to make a conscious choice to live more in the moment. I also began making an effort to work through my own blinders syndrome by using visual reminders to keep things in focus when life started moving fast again as it always does.  

So I counted out the weekends that I have left with my son and ordered some marbles and a glass container from Amazon. I then took a marble out for every weekend I had left with Adrian until he turned eighteen and put them in the glass container and kept in my office. I then began taking a marble out every Monday when I got in the office, and I’ve done so ever since.

I’ve learned a lot over the past few years, but I think this one lesson is the most significant of any of them. Since I started tracking weekends like this, I’ve begun to really make the most of my time with not just my son, but everyone in my family. I’ve started making more time for vacations instead of just working through the days I take off. I’ve started to be better about making time for my wife and the things she wants to do. Regular lazy Sundays where we may all waste the day away watching TV turned into days where we drive 2 hours to do a day hike or walk the dogs. 

This glass jar of marbles has helped me keep the eyes on the prize. It helps me remember what’s important when wrapped up in the daily chaos of life.  

So here we are, with only 271 weekends left with Adrian before he turns eighteen and he’s gone. Gone on to do his own things, achieve his own personal goals, create his own value in the world, and eventually start his own family.

To raise your kids to be able to become contributing members of society is what parenting is all about. What the marbles do though for me is serve as a reminder to make the most out of all 271 of those weekends until my own son gets there.