When I was a young and crazy mom of 5, I slept very little and ran breathless constantly trying to be the best wife and mom on the planet or at least in the school district. But just like in the sport of spinning plates - you do remember the guy who used to get on TV by spinning plates on sticks on the Ed Sullivan show, right? You do remember Ed Sullivan, the show where we first saw the Beatles? Well, if you are too young to have even heard of spinning plates, imagine a guy in a suit with a huge stack of plates in his arms. When the fast and furious music starts he runs up to the first of many tall, wobbly sticks stuck in a row and starts the first plate spinning on it. He then has to put a spinning plate on 20-something other sticks before any of them falls. Needless to say, there was much running back and forth to respin multiple plates and very often, broken china.

Raising a large family always felt like spinning plates but especially when it came to traditions. Whether they were started by my family or peer pressure from my kid's classmates, it seemed like we always had something extra to do simply because that's what you did. My husband, bless him, usually slammed the door on anything he wasn't raised with as soon as he found me up until 3am sewing Easter outfits or making my special potato salad for the reunion. His theory being that no one else would even notice unless it was their own tradition. And when I finally decided to spend time on things that really mattered to my children and let go of things I thought had to be done, life became far less stressful. We also began to create new traditions that belonged just to us. We started doing summer vacation at the dunes partly because we couldn't afford to take the herd anywhere far or expensive. Year after year, that was all we did but we came to truly love it. One year, after saving and planning, we announced to the kids that we weren't going to the dunes that summer because we were taking them all to Disneyland!!! You would have thought we told them they were going to the dentist. "You mean we don't get to go to the dunes!?!" To this day, only three of them have ever been to Disneyland. But even now as adults, they plan special trips from other states to go back to the vacations of their childhoods, bringing their children to build their own versions of the tradition. 

So life should be much smoother and less stressful now that my nest is empty but strangely, we seem to manage to over-fill our days if for no other reason than it's what is familiar. And now I find myself stressed by the new "traditions" brought on by technology. For instance, everyone said you have to text, check email contantly, get on facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest and a long list of industry specific websites and blogs. Well today I am declaring that I won't be enslaved by technology's new traditions. Email and text are part of my business and I am on facebook for my clients but I almost never have time for Twitter or several other things. I've joined many other sites only to feel guilty because if I am busy running the business I love, I don't have time for the technology. So, even though I told myself I would blog weekly, it rarely happens and I am now OK with that. When I have something worth saying, the blog will be new. When I am too busy to think (the month of May) this blog will get stale. The beauty of it all is that it's where I want to be. I think I'm the happiest when I have a dune-sized pile of images to process rather than a pile of tweets to read. When the workload allows, technology is an amazing way to gain knowledge and education, which I do as oftern as possible - but on my time and terms. Now you try it. Take a deep breath and dare to drop things you do because you think they matter to rest of the world.