July

It will be August in 9 days.  I find that hard to believe because our Washington, D.C. summer weather has been so temperate.  Additionally, I haven’t yet had a real vacation because my daughter has been away from home more than she’s been here, requiring her father and I to work rather than loaf around the house or on a beach.  

Boy, the house has been quiet. 

Due to the fact we’re not navigating the omnipresent needs of our 13-year-old “queen,” my husband and I have time on our hands to:

·         See a lot of doctors

·         Go for regular physical therapy treatments for various aches and pains on the recommendation of those doctors

·         Sleep until 6:30 in the morning

·         Stay up until 11 at night (whoopee!)

·         Watch whatever we want, including some really bad old movies with great actors – like Tommy Lee Jones in a terrible (but compelling) disaster film about a volcano in LA

·         Eat what our daughter would find unacceptable as dinner fare, like a really yummy chicken salad or omelet

·         Practice guitar (me) and complete crossword puzzles (him) without interruption

·         Go to the neighborhood pool (but not enough to justify our membership this summer)

·         Solicit bids on a bathroom remodel (which we’ve scaled back to basically re-tiling the shower)

·         Eat all the delicious Cadbury chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bars in the freezer (and not have to negotiate the next evening over who get the last one…because there isn't one)

When our daughter returns from her latest jaunt – her trip with friends to Niagara Falls – she’ll have a week home to focus on summer school work that she’s behind on because she’s been doing important things like growing up and just having some fun.  And then she’ll go off to camp again for a week in August.

In the meantime, my better half and I will cycle through the tasks of life listed above (in addition to going to work, of course) and enjoy this sneak preview of what our empty nest will look like 5 years from now.

I definitely think we need to cultivate a few hobbies.