It isn’t Groundhog Day.  But I feel a bit like Bill Murray in the eponymous movie.  As I reflect back on the year, and read what I was writing about at this time last year, I feel like not much has changed.  Not as much as I hoped, in any case.  Unlike last year, there’s not a bit of snow on the ground and we didn’t have a trip to Vegas cancelled because of a blizzard.  But other than that, things aren’t all that different from December 30, 2010.

We did have a pretty incredible vacation this past summer in France, that’s for sure.  We’re all one year older.  Chloe and Sophie are better tennis players than they were a year ago, and smarter too.  I now own an iPhone, which is like a third child, albeit inanimate.  But…

…All of my philosophical questions about where I was in my life at the end of 2010 are still unanswered.  OK – that’s not quite true. I have the answers, but I’m still afraid to act on them.  I am in the same place professionally as I was one year ago.  I’m working just as hard, if not harder.  I am still not spending as much time with my family as I would like because I’m still suffering from the “present, but not really present” syndrome.

The window of time I have to make a change and spend more time with my girls before they want nothing to do with me is quickly diminishing.  Let’s face it.  Chloe is now one year closer to the dreaded teenage years.  I only have about 730-1,065 days left before she becomes a teenage hermit texting in her bedroom and trying to avoid me at all costs.

I’m lucky to have Sophie and am grateful for the five-year age difference between the two girls.  That buys me some time with my little one.  But the seconds, minutes and hours will continue to tick away.  I need to make some decisions.

I just read that Samoa (not American Samoa, mind you, just Samoa), whose economy is now more dependent on Asia and Australia than on the United States, has decreed that it is going to change its time zone in order to have a 3-hour time difference with its principal trading partners instead of the current 21 hours.  Which makes sense – geographically Samoa is much closer to Asia and Australia than it is to the US. It’s just on the wrong side of the international date line.  But in order to effectuate this pretty drastic change, the country is skipping one day this weekend.   They went to bed tonight, Friday, and when they wake up tomorrow morning, it won’t be Saturday.  It’s going to be Sunday.

That got me thinking.  I would never want to miss any days with my girls.  I need to prolong this time with them.  I need time to stop, or at least move more slowly.  Definitely not more quickly.  Good thing we don’t live on Samoa.