School has started, summer is over, life is on its way back to normalcy . . . or normalcy as we know and accept it. During the summer months I work until 4:00 on most days. I do this in order to make up a few extra dollars to help supplement the fact that I have to pay for full time child care during those weeks. During the school year, I work until 2:30 in order to be able to pick Madison up from school each day. Now that school is back in, I am already beginning to feel some sense of relief. I don't comprehend how a single parent can work full time, raise a child (or children) and manage to get all their responsibilities done. When working until 4:00, I hit afternoon traffic on my commute home, which has me picking up Madison by about 4:35-4:40, and puts us home close to 5:00. At that time, we make dinner and change our clothes. A few of those days, I managed to squeeze in a workout, but unfortunately, most of those days I didn't. From 5:00, until 7:00 - 8:00 (Madison's bed time) we had 2-3 hours to spend together, to run errands, to take care of responsibilities, etc. That's just not much time. Each night, I typically elected (after errands or must-do responsibilities) to spend the evening with Madison in snuggle/movie mode, or coloring/book-making mode. In making that election, I elected to let my house work go undone, my laundry un-folded, my yard work untended, my mail unsorted. When the weekend came and we had a larger block of time, we'd knock out some of those chores, but made sure we didn't do it to the expense of missing out on pool time. It made for a chaotic summer, but in 20 years she'll never remember that the yard was overgrown, or that the house wasn't as neat as it could have been. With any luck she'll remember how great it felt to snuggle on the couch and fall asleep in the comfort of my chest. She'll remember watching the same movie (My Girl) several times that summer and crying every time. She'll remember ripping the pages out of her coloring book to reorganize them into a book the way she would have designed it and assigning me specific pages to color. She'll remember going to the pool and learning to swim in the deep end without any help. She'll remember playing frisbee in the front yard. She'll remember making new friends and cherishing old ones. So when you come over and you see my junk mail scattered on my living room couch, the floor unswept, clothes piled in front of the dryer, or any other project that I allowed to go undone for the moment, remember the time constraints I have and that those items remain undone by choice. I would hope that each of you would make the same choice.