Hey there. Remember me?

Today is gonna be the day.

The day that I finally get back up to speed with my blog. It’s not that I’ve forgotten that I have a blog. Something that I used to love and care for, but in the blur of the past few months the blog has had to take a back seat.

I only hope it hasn’t died from neglect.

There have been so many times in the past 2 months that I have thought, “I need to blog about this”, but there were just not enough hours in the day due to wedding preparations, packing up for his move to Denver and starting back to work. It was the perfect storm.

 My nurse mind has thought of it in terms of electrical impulses trying to pass through synapses in nerve cells. Too many jammed up caused a shut down. Bone tiredness which expressed itself in one thought…”later”.

And so, today is “later” for the blog. And me.

This is the day that I try to convey some sense of the range of emotions that have consumed me the past few months as we married off our baby son and became true blue empty nesters.

Except our nest is still not quite empty.

That is God’s mercy to me. With holidays coming up and already planned for out town company (GO NAVY!) arriving next week, the house will be hotelish for the next couple of months. There will be lots of activity in the kitchen, laundry to do, lists to make…my kind of wonderful.

Around the second week of January the truth of the situation will set in. But unlike the half generation before us, my people seem to be embracing this new stage of life. I am blessed to still be crazy in love with my hub and since we both work and are gone from each other during the day, I look forward to time with him in the evening.

However, I need to be honest here.

I have caught myself a couple of times this week walking over to “the fraternity”. That’s what we call the part of the house where the boy’s rooms are.

Were.

Now they are guest rooms. Beautiful, clean and neat, nothing out of place. Waiting for life to fill them up again. I always knew this day would come. Truthfully, in some of the more chaotic, messy years of mothering I dreamed of this day and how great it would be when rooms would always be clean and pillows straightened stayed that way. Like in a magazine.

In our real empty nest, so far, life still gets messy. Fall is becoming chillier by the day and drafty in the old farm-house at night. So..while we watch political pundits free of the grumbling and complaining kids, we still pull out blankets that I’m too tired to put away at the end of the night and look messy the next morning when I come downstairs.

My hub is embracing his inner Amish and taking to making butter (in our Ninja) from raw milk which is a HUGE messy ordeal. I don’t even go in the kitchen while he is working (or churning). The glass milk bottles are piling up on the sun porch, ready to returned to the Amish farm.

Here are some other misconceptions I had about what life would be like when the boys were gone:

–Laundry would be a twice a week occurrence. Untrue. Not with “I can only use a towel once” hub. Turns out the real laundry maker isn’t moving on. For 32 years I have tried to break this man of this habit. Guess it’s here to stay.

–The food bill would be less. This might be true, once we get past holidays and guests. And we stop eating out….it’s only two of us…right??

–I can finally do what I really want to do. Wait a minute, let’s be honest. I have been doing that for a while now- when the last one left for college.

Turns out what I really want to do is….have a house that is full of people and teeming with life and the mess that comes with it.

 A house and life that looks like a magazine can quickly grow stale and lonely.

I’ll take a mess, anytime!

Blessings,

Stephanie

PS….It’s great to be back!