Originally, I didn’t think I’d even have a column in this month’s newsletter. Work commitments have severely curtailed my involvement with the Preemie-L mailing list, and I thought I had lined up a guest columnist for this time around. Well, one thing led to another, and the guest column never materialized. Being one of the world’s truly great procrastinators, I waited until the 11^th hour to even ask when the deadline was. As I wracked my brain trying to come up with a topic for this column, I kept drawing a blank, and cursing myself for waiting so long to write this. Well, that got me to wondering why I had waited so long. And the answer was, "I didn’t have the time."

How many times do we as parents think this same thought? What we’re really saying is that this particular task wasn’t a high enough priority for us to do it any earlier. The problem is, too often our priorities are set incorrectly. For whatever reason (inertia, selfishness, fear, etc.), we are unwilling to make sacrifices in our lives so that we have the time to do the things that are truly important. I think we men are especially guilty of this.

I know so many men who completely distance themselves from their families, using the justification that they are the breadwinners and raising children is "women’s work." A man’s time must be spent earning money and putting food on the table. Strangely, these men don’t seem to have any problem finding the time to play golf, or go fishing, or work in their workshops. I myself am guilty of staying late to put the final scrub on a presentation, only to come home, eat dinner and then retreat into the basement to watch TV. How much quality time did I spend with my kids? Maybe five minutes, although they may dispute how quality that time really was.

Well, for some reason that I can’t put my finger on, something happened this weekend that broke that normal routine. Maybe it was the beautiful weather (sunny and 80° F after a long, dreary winter), maybe it was taking a three day weekend; I’m not sure. Anyway, I got up on Saturday morning and made my normal list of things that needed to get done this weekend. It’s likely the same mundane list most of you would come up with. And, as I often do, I put a couple of family activities on the list: go to a kite festival, and go bike riding. What was unusual is that I actually made the time to do these things.

Saturday morning we met my sister and her family, took the subway into Washington DC and walked around the Mall (the center of the city, with the seat of the US government and all the monuments) for a few hours. The Cherry Blossoms were blooming in spectacular fashion, the weather was perfect, and the cousins were thrilled to be able to go on an adventure together. We originally had reservations about being gone too long, as Eric (our preemie with asthma) is being neb’d three or four times per day, and we were concerned about messing up his schedule. We got home hours after his next scheduled dosage, but he wasn’t wheezing a lick. It was as if he was saying, "Dad, this is what I need to make me healthy." (Although there is a distinct possibility that what he was saying was, "Gee Dad, why don’t you get those nasty ducts in our house cleaned? The minute I got some fresh air I stopped wheezing!)