My wife and I are trying to work in a lot more routine family time together and with our son instead of simply making do with the free time that crops up. We had previously discussed exploring Paso Robles today, which is about 20 miles North of us, and went through with our plan despite my hacking cough and 102+ fever (yes I’m a bit loopy, and yes, I’ve been complaining about being sick all day).

The time together was great and we still managed to get our work done when we returned home this evening. I know this is nothing new (in fact, I suppose it is akin to the “Pay yourself first” principle), but putting family and happiness first in no way inhibited our ability to deliver on the “work” we had at the top of the list. In a weird kind of way, I think it actually made our work a bit more fulfilling—perhaps due to the fact that we weren’t allowing our professional lives to suffocate our family time. By the time we sat down to get the rest of our priorities done, we weren’t thinking about what we were missing, or if we spent enough time with our son, or if he was happy. We knew he had a great day and that he knows that we love him—so when we shifted over, there was nothing getting in the way of productivity. I’ve definitely been one to steam over how much a project or assignment is impacting my family time in the past, and I can’t tell you how much better this feels.

I don’t know why I feel the need to post some of the photos we shot, perhaps because my head feels really hot, but here are a few from earlier today:

TAGS: Family | Father | Son | Happiness | Priorities

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 11:44 pm and is filed under On Being A Father.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.