The neighbors are not always a fan of the times when your husband wakes up early on a Saturday morning and cannot sleep. Often, he gets up, makes himself a cup of coffee, and works on the bills. If, however, there is even a chance of rain in the forecast, he mows.
With only a brief concern for what the neighbors will think, or if they are sleeping, your husband is on a mission to take care of the mowing before the weekend even begins. Perhaps this is the reason why, though, that you have one of the best looking yards in the neighborhood. In fact, there are few things that can come between your husband and the lawn care that he loves to practice.

Even on the morning when your older daughter was moving into her apartment, he was out mowing. He woke up about 45 minutes before your daughter and decided, despite the early hour, that he would go outside and mow. Perhaps he was delaying the inevitable.

Parenting and Lawn Care Have Several Similarities

Looking back over the last five years, it is more than evident that your husband’s obsession with having the perfect lawn has intensified. He kicked up his attention to everything green that surrounded the house the year that your older daughter moved away for school. This morning, as further evidence, he bolted out the door to start the lawn mowing task before some hint of rain that only he seemed to know about. With barely a cloud in sight, however, you began to wonder if this was just one more way to avoid the inevitable. Now that your younger daughter is away at college, your older daughter will be moving the rest of her things out of your house in the course of the next few weeks.

Starting her accelerated nursing program at home because her new apartment building was not yet ready, this was finally the weekend when she would be moving out. Her schedule is busy with studying and preparing for tests, but she has scheduled a few hours today to move down kitchen items. Wanting to measure for some curtains, she also wants to purchase the necessary groceries that she will need when she is finally in her new home.

Her new home, of course, means that your home, that place most people at your stage in life like to call the nest, will be empty.

Finding a Healthy Work Life Balance Can be a Challenge

When your husband is not at home mowing and being a dad, of course, he is at work behind a computer monitor. As a Vice President of Development for a company that specializes in full lifecycle APIs and hybrid integration platforms, his time away form home is pretty detailed oriented and stressful. As a result, he is more than thankful for the many times that he is able to step away from those responsibilities. And while his team at work knows him as the person they turn to with concerns and questions about full lifecycle APIs, they also know that he can be very inflexible when it comes to meeting important deadlines and other status reports. At home, however, both, girls know that while his first answer may be a little gruff, their is a real soft heart behind that toughness.

Whether you are at work monitoring banking software or other kinds of full lifecycle APIs or you are at work making decisions between getting the mowing done or moving a daughter to college, it is always important to focus on the healthiest balance that you can find. And while an occasional weekend alert might occur with full lifecycle APIs, the most healthy workers are those who can actually find a way to separate work from home, job tasks from family members.

We live in fast paced times. Parents get up, go to work, come home, and repeat. Children grow up, move out, and create their own version of a fast paced life. Between these times, of course, are the real moments of life. The moments that children will remember, the moments that parents will treasure, and the moments that you would never want to miss because you were at work.