When you're young, free and single you don't realise how much free time you have.

"Don't have time for that" shouldn't have even been in my vocabulary.

When you meet someone and start getting serious, you will probably start seeing them most evenings and / or weekends.

Despite enjoying the time spent with your new partner, you will remember just how much extra time you had for those pursuits.

Then you move in together and perhaps get married.

You may then start to reminisce about those evenings every other day when your time was all your own to do with as you wished.

Staying up till 3 am to play video games? No problem!

And then you may have a child together.

Now yours and your partner's every waking moment is there to make sure that your child is happy, healthy and loved.

They have no past memories.

They are a clean slate.

Their time for pursuits and discovery is in front of them.

When you are woken at random times in the middle of the night, which then makes you too tired in the day, you will remember how much time your partner and you had before your bundle of joy arrived.

And then the second one arrives.

You will start to reminisce over how much time you actually had during nap times. And at night when your first one started sleeping through the night finally.

Now it's just small pockets of time.

Concentrated moments for you to really focus in on the things that you want to pursue for yourself.

I'm lucky.

I found the person I'm happy and grateful to be spending the rest of my life with.

And we've been blessed to have brought two perfect children into the world.

I love my life now.

This is a post for my children to read when they are old enough.

I want them to consider the path they choose to walk -- with whoever they hope to walk it with.

I want them to know that if they find the right person as I did, then the sacrifices are merely exchanges; upgrades to an even better, more fulfilling life.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us

Gandalf -- The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.