My daughters grew up with parents that were Paramedics then ER Nurses. We were constantly teaching them lessons that we learned on a daily basis in the ED. (You truly never know what is going to come through the doors on any given day, and you really can’t make some of this stuff up.) They also received great immune systems because we brought everything home to them. :) We taught them how to triage life decisions from a young age (critical thinking). We passed on our weird sense of humor that we used to deal with the stress of our job. We also taught them that life is short.

You never know when you will lose your loved one or when it will be your time. There is no crystal ball to tell us. I spent many hours in my career holding people while they cried, my heart breaking with theirs at the sudden loss of their loved one. One thing that I grew to understand is that we need to make the most of every moment of every day because we never know when it will be our last or the last of someone we love. I learned that we need to tell the people we love that we love them no matter how hard that may be at times.

Related to this we started a tradition in our family of Life is Short, Eat Dessert First. We would make all of our favorite pies near Thanksgiving and line them up on the table on Thanksgiving morning. We would invite friends or family over and have dessert and coffee first thing in the morning. Celebrating life, family, and friendship. Then everyone would part ways and we would cook our thanksgiving meal and have dessert again afterward! :) Can you really ever have too much dessert!?

Life is worth celebrating every day! We all have bad days, but if you look hard enough you can find something in the day that is good. So eat dessert!