Hey buddy can I borrow, some time?

I get so much help from friends and family.  They take care of getting the girls to school in the morning, to the after school activities, and generally help out getting them to and from wherever they need to get to while I'm at work.  They provided support to allow us to have someone come in once a week and clean the house.  I'm sure that they would do just about anything they could to help us with whatever it might be that we need.  But the one thing I would like more than anything else is some more time.

Rather than rely on friends and family to take the girls here and there, I would like to have the time to do that.  They go shopping after school sometimes for clothes and stuff, I would like to do that.  I've talked before about the things that hurt the most are the things that the girls won't have.  They won't have Cindy to pick them up at school and drive them to the rink.  Cindy won't be sitting in the bleachers freezing her butt off watching them skate (and gossiping with the other moms :).  Cindy won't be volunteering at school.  There isn't anything I can do to change that.  I wish though that along with all the other things that Cindy did that I now do, that I could at least spend those few additional hours with them. 

Some of this is that uneasy feeling that we have to rely on someone else all the time.  I may not be a driven to succeed as some people, but Cindy and I always took pride in our ability to provide for ourselves.  It was akward when we had to get help to make the downpayment on our house, and we did everything we could to pay that back.  When you are raising children there are times when it is impossible to do everything without some extra help.  There were many times when we would need to find the girls rides to or from school because we were both working.  But we were always able to reciprocate.  Our minivan put on many miles filled with kids from the neighborhood.  That is just the way it is these days when it seems like every family has to have two incomes.

After I got a degree going to night school I was eventually able to get a job working as a programmer.  It wasn't very glamorous, and I was expected to work long days many time six days a week.  More travel than I liked, but we were young.  When we started our family things started off on the wrong foot.  I was traveling for work and was unable to get home in time when Cindy went into labor a month early.  The first year with our daughter didn't get all that much better.  As a matter of fact I was so afraid that I might miss the birth of our second child, that I ended up quiting that job so I could work somewhere that would allow me to spend more time with my family.  I didn't want find out what neat things my daughters did while I was out of town for work.  For the most part I was able to find jobs that didn't require that I travel that much.  After our first child Cindy and I decided we would try to see if we could live off my salary.  We made sure that Cindy let her job know that we wanted to make sure that she would have the opportunity to go back to work if she needed to.  As it turned out I don't think she could have gone back.  We couldn't imagine giving our baby to someone else all day so she could go to work.  We felt it was so important for the girls to have their mother there with them as much as possible. 

That didn't help me at all on the days when Cindy did go somewhere for a day and I had to figure out how to get a breastfed baby to take a bottle.  On at least one occasion I broke down and took my baby down the street to give her to a "real" mom to try and calm her down.  And that mom is still helping us out today

Cindy was lucky in that as the girls got older she was able to find jobs with hours that would allow her to work while the girls were in school or at times when I could watch the girls.  As the girls got older Cindy was able to some extent resume her career and work doing the things she knew and loved.  There were many times that we watched other families with bigger houses, fancier cars, cooler "stuff", and wondered if we were doing the right thing.

I can look back now and fell certain that we made the correct choices when we made the decisions we made.  I'm so glad that the girls were able to spend as much time with their mother as they did growing up.  I can't imagine that it makes it any easier for them now to have spent so much time with her as they were growing up.  During that time she certainly did a good job preparing them to be strong young women.

Now more than anything else I would like to have the time to take over for Cindy. 

Hey buddy, can you spare me some time?