I’ve always been real good at preaching about life balance, but unfortunately, I’ve never been very effective about actually doing it for myself.  That is, until my daughter was born nearly two years ago.

For the past twenty months, Thursday has been “Daddy’s day.”   I get home by 5, eat dinner with my daughter (just the two of us), go for a short walk around the neighborhood, push her on the swings for a while (while she says “weeeeeee”), take her back home, give her a bath, read her a few books (never missing a word or she’ll make me start over) and put her to sleep.

I love Thursdays. No matter how hard a day or week I’m having, Thursday is always the best day of the week.  Walking in the door to be greeted by a running little girl screaming “Daddy!” is the best feeling in the world.  

Sure we spend plenty of other time together, but Thursdays are special. As you can imagine, I travel, so if I’m away, we reschedule to the very next day I’m home. Thursdays simply can’t be skipped and forgotten.

My daughter doesn’t care about Google traffic, the stock market or email open rates. She loves flowers, pumpkins,  our “puppies” (one of which is so old he hasn’t been called a puppy in a decade by anyone else), goldfish (the orange crackers you eat)  and the color pink.  I love these things as well and always will.

So, this is a short post to remind you to stop, breathe and smell the roses. Life is a gift. Treasure each moment.  Tell someone you miss them. Pay someone a compliment. Do something nice for someone without asking for something in return.  At the risk of trying to commercialize an otherwise heartfelt post, call a few clients just to say hello and ask how they’re doing.  Like my mother always said, “Be nice to people and they’ll be nice to you.”  Who knows, you might actually hear “funny you called, I was thinking about starting to plan our March trip…”