Phone manners

My youngest snuck up on me this afternoon when I was on the phone. I didn't hear him until he was right behind me and I turned around with a start. I had been sitting at my desk, so he figured I must be working. Apparently the time he spent at home last week when I couldn't get him to school because of the closed roads was not for naught. He began whispering to me. I asked my friend to hang on a sec and put my hand over the phone, as I whispered back, "honey, you don't have to whisper..." So why was I whispering? And then in a normal voice, "I'm not really working right now; what do you need?"

I took him by the hand and told my friend that she was taking a walk with me while we went to find the red sweatshirt instead of the blue and gray striped one.

The ironic thing is, I was really working. It was a beautiful, sunny early spring day...and I was downloading materials from a vendor site that I would later need to publish elsewhere. I trudged back up to my office after I sent my youngest off with his dad and thought about the saying, "why put off til tomorrow what you can do today?" and weighed the fact that it was Sunday against the fact that I had already put this project off for quite a while.

Sometimes work permeates my life and sometimes life permeates my work. I have given up on trying to achieve work-life balance. The boundaries have become blurry thus it's more like work-life blending. Last week when I had children home for three of the five days, it was occasionally work-life battle. But, like how do we learn to practice patience if we never have opportunities to test it, how are kids going to learn their phone manners if they don't have a chance to use them?