Reality Check

I am a super busy mom and most people would look at my daily planner and laugh, because there is so much scribble filling in every square. In the month of April alone I have 10 squares with some kind of appointment on them. Appointment equals sit in a waiting room for 1-2 hours, sit in the exam room waiting for the doctor for 1- 2 hours possibly get sent to the pharmacy and wait for 1-2 more hours. In other words ,don't plan anything else for that day except making sure my family is fed.

Any way, what does that have to do with this photo....Last week my two high school daughters were a part of an assimilation at their school which involved a drunk driving accident being faked in front of the high school involving students that attend the same school. The accident was made to look quite real including an ambulance, police arresting the driver and even a life flight helicopter really taking a student to the hospital. The accident was done in the morning and for the rest of the school day every 15 minutes a heartbeat would go off over the load speaker and stop with the beeping sound usually made in the hospital when someone's heart stops beating. After this somewhere in the school a person dressed as the grim reaper would enter one of the classrooms and take away a student. This student would be taken away and dressed in black and made up to look dead. They would walk through the rest of their school day not allowed to talk or interact with anyone. They were called the "walking dead". At the end of the day all the walking dead lined up in front of the school holding crosses and all students exiting the school had to walk through the line as they left. All done to educate the students that every 15 minutes someone dies in an alcohol related accident and very often it is someone in high school. The following day a memorial service was held for two students that "died" in the assimilation. My words don't do the whole thing justice, but the bottom line is the whole experience was quite eye opening and emotional for the majority of the students.

Much to our shock, the day before the planned assimilation a close friend of my high school daughters arrived home from school and found her father dead from a heart attack. This made the assimilation all the more intense because so many of the student's involved knew the girl that lost her father.

So today all the things that filled in the April 11th square were put aside to attend a funeral....Reality Check.... the photo above represents the reality check my whole family received over this past week. So suddenly our busy lives can be "interrupted" by one of those monumental tragedies that we hope will never come ,but do. Hopefully, we pause long enough to realize that most of those squares on our planner really aren't filled with the important stuff of life. Life that could change dramatically in the next breath. The fact that I put aside my pile of work for 10 minutes to read my daughter her favorite book or I stopped making lunches long enough to go and hug my high schooler good bye before she left for school or that i found five minute to spare to pop a card in the mail to my grandpa is oh so much more important. Reality Check...I am choosing to pause this week and take this in, so if, and when, another reality check touches our lives, we will at least feel the squares on the planner have been spent doing worthwhile things.