“Save it for the fall” has become our mantra around here. My sister’s two children and my two children, all four of them, will be in school this fall. For the first time in our lives, we will have the house to ourselves to work on GTWoman Magazine.
While we admit this is a bittersweet transition, we’d like to outline some of the celebrations that will be unfolding.
Any and all fantastic, mind-blowing ideas are now on a time line. Instead of worrying we don’t have the time or resources to blow minds, we simply table the fantasticness and announce that we shall “save it for the fall.”
For, in the fall, we hope that time will unfurl and hand us back our minds after running the magazine with chillins’ at our feet and in our minivans for 7 years.
Here’s how we sound day or night:
Kerry: “Let’s go to a dude ranch and rope cattle.”
Kandy: “Save it for the fall.”
Kandy: “Let’s go national with GTWoman.”
Kerry: “Save it for the fall.”
Kerry: “Let’s clean the house.”
Kandy: “Save it for the fall.”
Of course, once the semi-empty nest is upon us, we will surely be plunged into a deep depression. Even now, we’re a little haunted, wondering what we will do with the booming echo of a house empty from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week.
“Save it for the fall” has been our coping mechanism. Perhaps we’ll be so busy this fall we won’t notice the loneliness, what with our clean houses and coiffed style?
Well, for the first week, we can guarantee that there won’t be a lot accomplished. We’ll spend a good 15 minutes moping about the house, looking at their pile of discarded trains and feel a yearning for the “good old days.” Then we’ll snap back to reality and remember the good old days also involved diapers and the ever-present threat of a double homicide.
Here are our plans focusing on the positive and not the emptiness:
- Watch a full episode of The Young and The Restless. Uninterrupted. Volume below ear-splitting. Daily.
- Eat cookies. That we don’t have to share. Hourly.
- Clean our offices. Put our stapler where we want it. Find it there the next day. With staples still in it.
- Feed the cats. Have the food remain in the bowl and not become cargo for Thomas, James and Percy, Sodor Island’s trio of steam engines.
- Feed ourselves. Not last. Not after cutting, buttering and arguing. Have pleasant conversations with others without removing a child from the ceiling fan of an eating establishment.
- Open the porch door. Not have the screen banged open and shut 15 times during Y&R and walked thru during B&B. (If you know what B&B stands for, you’re in the club. Details below.)
- Start Moms Survival Club. This is for moms who have worked from home through the preschool years and survived. This club will entail ice cream not dropped on the floor, salon outings without a battle of wills ensuing and shopping where no one crawls under a locked door or announces they can see your underwear
- Work.
- Return phone calls without hunkering down in a bedroom with a barricade made out of dresser drawers and laundry.
Besides these basic goals, we are also having daydreams of houses that are cleaner, laundry that is doner and dishes that are dryer.
There’s probably a slew of moms who will tell us that even after the kids are in school, things will not get done. To them we say… “save it for the fall.”