Day gift idea mother preschoolers

Late autumn brings with it my favorite day of the year--not Halloween, not Thanksgiving, but the end of daylight-saving time, the day we turn our clocks back an hour. You know: "Spring ahead, fall back." To claim that hour strikes me as a profound luxury, even if I use it only to catch a bit of extra sleep or time to read the newspaper or make pancakes rather than a rushed bowl of cereal. It's a gift of time--a precious commodity in a frenzied world.

The pleasure of savoring the moment doesn't have to come but once a year. "Save tomorrow for tomorrow/Think about today in-stead," goes the catchy lyric to "What's the Buzz?" by Andrew Lloyd Webber, from "Jesus Christ Superstar" (or go to the source, Matthew 6:34).The timeless injunction to live in the present moment is interpreted in our secular, postmodern world as a mandate to pursue sensory and sensual stimuli leading, ideally, to our greater experience and knowledge, not to mention good times. "Sex and drugs and rock and roll," went another cheeky song I used to hear on the radio, "are all my brain and body needs." Even if we knew that wasn't really true, it was a tempting anthem to the possibility of claiming the pleasure of the moment.

And yet even those of us who have long given up late nights and devil-may-care party habits still hang on to the idea that we need to pack a multiplicity of experiences tightly into our short days. Still: "There never seems to be enough time/To do the things we want to do/Once we find them," reflected singer-songwriter Jim Croce in "Time in a Bottle." Indeed, life in a household of people with different schedules, interests and transportation needs would confront the equilibrium of even the calmest Zen master. It's all good, as they say, but it's all crazy-making too, when you're the responsible adult.

Thankfully, we have three great tools to track our ever-lovin' logistical labyrinths-voicemail, e-mail and cell phones--and (my apologies to Paul and the Corinthians) the greatest of these is the cell phone. The cell phone has evolved from tool to talisman, its function no longer merely utilitarian but iterative. I used to need a cell phone if I needed to be reached at any minute; now I must be able to be reached at any minute so I need a cell phone.

I know I'm not supposed to use my cell phone while driving but it's so tempting to multitask. Hey, if I can hold a conversation with a passenger, pass out snacks to the carpool kids and track the latest election news while driving, I guess I can call my husband at work, my aunt in California, my dad in Seattle or my friend in Delaware. Besides, I only dial when I'm sitting at a red light and I'm sick of NPR.

But in one of those cosmic warnings, a moment of epiphany, my cell-phone plan just fell through. And I don't mean I ran out of minutes--after all, I have 1,500 a month. What I mean is, I've sworn off the illusion that I can tame time by talking through it.

A couple of days ago on my way to the grocery store, I sat at a red light at a busy intersection and dialed a call. I got voicemail and began to leave a message instructing my husband to pick up one child from swimming practice at 6:00 and reminding him we were going to have chicken for dinner, yadda, yadda. My brain having detached from the reality that I was at a red light, not a four-way stop, I absentmindedly pulled into the intersection. I heard the blare of a car horn before I saw the car barreling toward me. I dropped the phone, slammed the brakes and stopped in the middle of the intersection, avoiding an accident but shaken and born again to the Zen of now. Multitasking is overrated. No matter what Verizon or MCI would have us believe, we can't buy time.

Later that day, I sat in the delightful quietude of a university library, the only sounds the tappety-tap of my laptop keyboard, the occasional rustle of a student's study paraphernalia, or the ting of the elevator announcing its arrival. The big window onto the quad reveals a group of preschoolers, probably from a nearby daycare, running and playing under glorious butterscotch maples beneath the gray sky. My large skim latte is cooling. (I declined the barista's offer of an extra shot, which would have brought the total espresso content to four shots.) And I am especially glad of this opportunity to sit and watch the turning of the world.

[Kris Berggren is a Minneapolis mother of three and author of the booklet Advent for Families 2004: The Greatest Gift of All (Twenty-Third Publications). Her e-mail address is krisberggren@msn.com]