What Are You Looking At vs. What Do You See?

(First of all, not related to point of this post, I'd like to publicly whine about the sorry size of our recycle bins.  "We want you to recycle, just not very much.")

This scene made me drive back around for a second look (and a photo).  Let me explain:  Today is recycle day.  Once a week, the recycle truck picks up the recycling.  So how did they NOT see the can labeled "recycle" right next to the recycle bin?  Because someone was focused ONLY on seeing the recycle bins. 

How much do we miss 'seeing' while we are focused on the task at hand?  How much 'living' have we missed out on while 'making a living'?

What are you looking at?  What do you REALLY see?

I may have to surrender my "Awesome at Being a Mom" card

Yesterday, after basically 11 days stuck in the house after surgery, I had just about lost my freakin' mind and desperately needed to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!  So I decided to head to Central Market and invite (drag) the kids along.
Strike One: We took too long in the store. Strike Two: The bottom fell out of the sky and it poured rain.  Strike Three: We hit the freeway just a few minutes after 5:00pm.
We're out!  I made my daughter late for work.  Nice.


Today, The Captain and I took Sk8ter and some friends to a skate function at a local church.  They had the opportunity to use all the skate equipment AND meet Christian Hosoi, a professional skateboarder who just happens to be a Jesus freak also.  Awesome!
There were LOTS of kids doing all kinds of fancy skateboard tricks (there are names for these things, but I am just not that cool) and Sk8ter was a little timid.  I kept trying to encourage him to participate and he did, eventually, but it didn't go as he had hoped and he got discouraged.  Then he asked for a snow cone.  I told him I'd buy him one as soon as he tried one more time.  Bribery.  Is that wrong?  I really just wanted him to build his confidence by participating.  Lots of people were falling and not completing their tricks and we wanted him to take notice of that and see that they just kept trying, over and over and over.
So he tried again.  That's the good news.  The bad news?  He fell.  Hard!  He got some serious road rash on his knee, complete with blood.

I rawked my mom-skillz these past two days.

And these are the reasons I may have to surrender my "Awesome at Being a Mom" card.