Why What You Do This Week Matters!

As another school year winds down, we feel proof of how quickly time passes. Many of my friends are graduating a high school senior and contemplating how it all went so fast.

Do you know how many weeks you have from the day a child is born until he or she graduates from high school?

Fill a jar with 936 pennies and you’ll have a visual countdown clock to see approximately how many weeks you have.

The jar will look nice and full. Lots of time with one another, right?

That is until I subtract 765 pennies for the weeks that have already gone by with my first born triplets. Gulp. This is what four years left with them looks like…..

The jar on the left represents the weeks we’ve already spent together. The one on the right is the time we have left.

How I invest these 171 pennies that I have left with my firstborn sons at home will help shape the rest of their lives. They graduate 8th grade next week and like a lot of you, I’m wondering where has the time gone.

I purposely took these photos during a weekend baseball tournament because that’s where a lot of our pennies have been spent- at fields, on courts and in rinks. We must be intentional in our spending habits because we can’t get this precious time back.

Time seemed to stand still when my kids were young. Those days were long and the years crept by. Somehow that’s no longer the case.

Each year seems to speed by faster than the last one. There is no slowing childhood down unless we intentionally slow our pace.

I encourage you to make up your own simple countdown clocks and fill them with pennies, marbles or whatever visual item you want to use. Mine sit on my windowsill above my kitchen sink so that I see them several times a day. They remind me to value time and to make something about each week matter.

Want help in figuring out how many weeks you’ve already spent together? Use this elapsed time calculator.

I don’t want to be sad when that right jar is empty in four years. I want to look at the full one and say, “Wow, now that was a fun ride!”