Distractions....

    Right now I am at Starbucks having a Hazelnut blended tall coffee and trying to write down some ideas for my next blog.  The weather is perfect and I am sitting next to the fountain so the ambiance is nice. Well it was for a minute!  A girls soccer team and a boys baseball team just finished eating their share of pizza, licorice and sodas and are expending their energy running around me like a crazed tribe of Apaches surrounding a broken down wagon train.  Now I like kids (well not the kid with "Perkins" written on the back of his jersey- he screams louder than I do at a Neil Diamond concert.) I don't like the screaming and out of control "Walking Dead" like mass hysteria that comes with them when they get into groups.
   It's been a while since my kids were young (they are now 22, 24 and 26.)  I remember the screaming and excitement when their friends would come over to our house.  I was sure that the neighbors would suspect "human sacrifice" was being practiced at our abode.  I tried everything I could (feeding them, putting on a movie, trying to get them to play a board game with me, etc. etc.) I just wanted them to be quieter so the neighbors or people in the next county wouldn't hate us.  The reason I wanted them quiet was because I knew that if I was trying to do an activity I didn't want to be distracted, so I didn't want to be the cause of someone else's unproductiveness.  Unfortunately, not every parent feels the same way.
  As I sit here with the screaming, running, jumping and potential for pandemonium I can't help but imagine that this is my life.  Not this exactly, but that everyday I wake up with a list of duties to complete (besides my job.) Instead of screaming coming from that irritating Perkins it's returning a phone call from a patient with a question about something.  Instead of those sixteen nine year old girls running past me, bumping my coffee and causing general unrest it's one of my employees telling me that they need to leave work early or come in later because of a personal reason.  Instead of a ten year old boy in cleats trying to jump over the empty chair next to me it's a piece of equipment that has decided to stop functioning properly and requires my complete attention (right Now!!)  Instead of pandemonium from the under supervised group of children surrounding me it's a letter that just arrived in the mail from either the IRS or my divorce lawyer.  Somehow, someway my work gets done and my list gets done (for the most part.)
    So which came first the chicken or the egg?  Did having kids make me better at handling distractions or did I get distracted and have kids?